A Front Page Affair by Rhada Vatsal: Book Review

Anyone who knows me knows I love a cosy mystery. If they know me really well, they might know that the things I like most are complex, engaging characters, a believable setting and a good plot. In this respect, Rhada Vatsal’s A Front Page Affair, partly delivers.

Kitty (real name Capability) Weeks is a New York socialite in the early months of the First World War. Europe is getting deeper into conflagration and America is poised on the edge of war. Kitty, an aspiring journalist with the society pages of a New York newspaper, is sent to cover a party at an uptown country club, only to find herself witness to murder — and of course, she’s determined to track the killer down.

I very much wanted to like this book, and it does have a lot going for it. It has a clever setting and fictional events are cleverly woven in with actual historical ones. The plot was clever, focussing on the diplomatic manoeuvrings around America’s potential entry into the war, and there were twists and turns aplenty, although, if I’m honest, some of them stretched my credibility a little bit too far (no spoilers, but surely no FBI agents would allow a member of the public along on a mission to intercept a killer just because she happened to be interested in the case).

So far, so good, but the element of the book the rather disappointed me was the characterisation. For me, any book has to be driven by the characters. I want to feel engaged by them. I want to care about them. In this book, I didn’t, and the end result was that I felt the whole thing was rather superficial. Characters came and went. There was no depth to them, no complications. Kitty herself was a spoiled rich girl and never really stopped to think about anything, except in passing. The minor characters, too, weren’t clearly drawn in terms of character (describing someone’s external appearance is only part of it) and, for example, all the FBI agents tended to merge into one in my head as I read.

I realise I’m being fussy, here, and other people may look for different things from a book. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but just one that didn’t give me what I’m looking for from a cosy novel. If you want a pacy, light read with a few twists and  lot of fascinating (real-life) background about New York in 1915, then this is definitely your book, even if it wasn’t mine.

Book Review: Death at Hungerford Stairs by JC Briggs

This is the second in the series by JC Briggs with Charles Dickens (yes, that one) as the protagonist. In Death at Hungerford Stairs, Dickens and his friend, police superintendent Sam Jones, are searching for Scrap, a missing friend of theirs who lives on the streets. The body that’s discovered in the old blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs isn’t the boy they were searching for, but a stranger — and he’s been murdered. Later, another dead boy appears, killed in the same manner, and the chase is on to find the killer — and save Scrap.

I enjoyed this book very much, just as I did the first in the series, though I have to say the weaknesses are the same. On the plus side, I really loved the insight into Victorian London and the way the squalor of its poorer quarter sits side-by-side with (but overlooked by) areas of extreme wealth and opulence. Again, I think the author’s scene-setting is exceptional and felt that I was walking through London of the 1850s.

Like Dickens himself, Briggs seems to separate the minor characters, who are pretty much caricatures, from the major ones. Dickens, Sam Jones, Jones’s wife and some others feel very real, people with feelings and emotions and complex back stories (though we see a little less of them than we did in the first book, which is a bit of a shame).

The minor caricatures are all faintly comic, identifiable by street speech, odd appearance and strange names— Occy Graves, Zeb Scruggs and so on. They have back stories, too, but the telling of them, often in story form in the dialogue, doesn’t allow us the same kind of insight that we do when we’re allowed to live lives with them, as we are with Dickens and with Jones. The downside is that I couldn’t connect with them in the same way, and that was a pity because (no spoilers) even at the moment of highest drama, I was left largely unmoved by the fate of the characters involved.

I enjoyed the plot, too, though it was perhaps a little bit slender and didn’t really involve a huge amount of detecting. But it had a satisfactory ending and one which I didn’t guess.

I’d definitely read more by the same author, and this gets a solid four stars. But much as I love the description I do think less is more and I’d have sacrificed some of it for a little more plot and some deeper characterisation.

The things I don’t really like about this book are the things I don’t really like about Dickens’ works, which is something I hope the author will take as a compliment. Fans of the great man will love it, I suspect.

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

Murder Under a Green Sea by Philip Hunter: book review

I love a good historical murder mystery and I’m generally quite forgiving of the odd eccentricity. That said, I have to confess to mixed feelings about Philip Hunter’s Murder Under a Green Sea. It ought to be right up my street. Set in 1937, with war on the horizon, it focuses in on Max and his wife Martha. Martha is very rich and Max, who has a very humble background, is poor. When members of Max’s old platoon from the first World War start dying in suspicious circumstances and Max is the prime suspect, the two of them set out to try and solve the mystery.

What was so problematic? There were  couple of things. The first was that it was very slow to start. For much of the opening I ploughed on through bits of story that seemed at best unnecessary and at worst silly. There was a dinner party scene that seemed to go on as long as the dinner party itself and, although it later emerged that some of what went on there was germane to the later plot development, it could have been done a lot more quickly and a lot more snappily. And, bluntly, the same thing could have been achieved with better (for which read more subtle) development of the characters.

Fortunately I have staying power. I hung in there and when the plot finally took off it was (apart from the odd little niggle) pretty good — very Boy’s Own in places, to the point of stretching my credibility, but nevertheless it was fast-moving and exciting. (Though I’m sorry — I identified the villain very early on, though not the motive.)

I liked the set-up very much, with Max’s insecurity balanced against his wife’s self-confidence and, beneath it all, a tender love story between the two. The rest of the characters weren’t so good, though — I think that’s why the action felt, in places, little bit beyond my credibility.

The big problem I had with it was tone. As so often the case it’s a subjective thing, but I didn’t feel the flippancy of the overall style was in keeping with the plot and, as a consequence, it undermined my enjoyment of the whole story. It’s a great plot and I wanted to get on with it. The author’s constant flippant asides irritated me intensely when, if he’d kept his humour to the characters (their speech and their actions) he might have got away with it.

It’s a good book if you like your thrillers flippant, which I don’t, but it’s the plot that saves it — though I’d very much like to have got into the plot a lot earlier.

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

Past Encounters by Deborah Swift: Book Review

It’s confession time. I’ve never seen Brief Encounter. 

It was on telly over Christmas, as it happens, and I ignored it in favour of a book -- something that turned out to be a mistake on two counts. The first was that the book I chose wasn’t great (I didn’t bother reviewing it so don’t ask me what it was) and the second was that if I’d watched it, Deborah Swift’s Past Encounters, one of whose plot lines is the making of the film, might have meant a bit more to me. 

But it doesn’t matter. Even for a Brief Encounters virgin, Past Encounters was a fabulous, uplifting read. It tells the stories of Peter and Rhonda, trapped in a childless and unhappy ten-year marriage, and how Rhonda uncovers the horrors of Peter’s wartime story while coming to terms with her own lost love. You don’t need to know the original Encounter. Swift’s book stands up just fine on its own. 

From beginning to end, I loved it. When Peter is taken prisoner early in the war Rhonda, not knowing if he’s alive or dead, finds herself trapped in an over-hasty engagement from which she fears she may never be released. Working extra shifts as a caterer on the set of Brief Encounter (filmed in Carnforth) she falls in love with Matthew, one of the production managers. It’s no spoiler to say that this romance ends unhappily with Matthew’s untimely death, because the real story is how her marriage to Peter unravels and how the discovery of his many secrets changes both their lives. 

The period detail is terrific, the characterisation realistic, and the story itself by turns harrowing and poignant. Swift doesn’t shrink from showing the darker sides of human nature, but the book is, ultimately, uplifting. A wonderful read. 

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

Book Review; the murder of Patience Brooke by JC Briggs

So, here’s my second book of the New Year, and a very good one it was, too. JC Briggs’ The Murder of Patience Brooke is the first in a series of historical mysteries with an intriguing premise — that Charles Dickens works with the police to solve a series of murders.

I’m not the world’s biggest Dickens fan, which doesn’t matter at all, and know very little about him, which possibly does given the references to his insecurities about his background and his uncertainty about his marriage. I felt there was a layer in this book that I’m rather missing out on; but maybe I’m wrong. And even if I’m not, there was plenty here to get stuck into as Dickens and his friend, Superintendent Sam Jones, set out to solve the mystery of the murder of virtuous and mysterious Patience Brooke, found gruesomely displayed outside the home for fallen women which Dickens established.

There was so much to enjoy in this book. The plot was engaging and gathered pace as our heroes began to run the villain to earth. The central characters were rounded and appealing and Dickens’ unhappy marriage (and large family) was cleverly contrasted with Jones’ happy, but childless, one. I did feel that many of the subsidiary characters were less rounded and more caricatured — though in fairness, that’s true of Dickens’ novels so maybe it was a deliberate nod to the master, even though that particular element didn’t work for me.

I had a few niggles. I found the writing a bit clunky in places, to the extent that it detracted from the dram of the closing scenes, and I was distracted by the use of ‘street speak’. (Is there really any value in using ‘sed’ for ‘said’ or ‘woz’ for ‘was’ when they sound the same?) And there was one point where a conversation referred to two different characters called Crewe and Carew, which had me momentarily confused.

It wasn’t the detectives who stole the show, though. It was Victorian London. The descriptions of the old city, its glories and it hell-holes, its sound and smells, its muffling fog, its early mornings and threatening darkness, were fantastic. If there was no other reason for me to read more in this series (and there are many), the setting alone would keep me going. London is the protagonist in this book, far more striking and capricious (and believable) even than Dickens himself.

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

The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea: A Review

So, following on from the wonderful Once Upon a River, I was looking for another book in similar style that would match it. And I think, in Caroline Lea’s The Glass Woman, that I’ve found it.

The Glass Woman is set in late seventeenth century Iceland, a place I’m barely familiar with beyond a short break where my tracks passed briefly across those of the protagonists and a time about which I know very little history in my own context, let alone that of anywhere else. And yet the premise was appealing — Rosa, a young woman sent to marry Jon, a rich (relatively speaking) and powerful man who is distrusted and whose first wife is dead. And from the very beginning, I was hooked.

The timeline chopped and changed a bit as the narrative switched between Rosa and Jon and that initially confused, but as I worked out what was happening it made perfect sense as their stories headed towards an inevitable collision and a subsequent separation.

In saying what I liked about it, the old problem rears its head: how do I review without giving away too much? I shall have to stay vague. The characters were fantastic — Rosa, submissive to keep herself safe and her village fed; Jon, living in fear of the consequences of a past mistake; Pal, patiently in love with another man’s wife; jealous Pedar, the sullen misfit who works on the farm… they’re just a few of a strong cast of characters.

The land and the culture are powerful players too, and the old religion resists the oncoming of the new, and where loving the wrong person or whispering an old song can lead you to death. The harshness of a land that seemingly swallows people up — and sometimes disgorges them again — is wonderfully compelling.

I really loved this book. It drew me in, kept me absorbed, reading on and on as the inevitability of human nature came up against traditional society. There’s power, there’s greed, there’s passion and there’s death, all at play in a landscape without mercy, and too many moments of sheer, gut-wrenching drama to pick one out. Wonderful.

Thanks to Netgalley and Michael Joseph publishing for the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.