‘A House of Knives’ William Shaw

Published by Quercus,
12 June 2014.
ISBN: 978-1782064206

London, 1968. Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen has a death threat in his in-tray and a mutilated body on his hands – the wayward son of a rising MP ...

This police procedural evokes what the swinging sixties were like for so many ordinary people: grotty bed-sits mixed with posh houses decorated in the newest style and squats of drug-taking hippies, racism, the police corruption and brutality, as drunks are beaten up in the cells. Breen’s side-kick Helen Tozer resents the sexist comments and attitudes: as a WPC, she’s not allowed to drive, and tea-making and children are automatically her job. Forensics is in its infancy, and to get help in a tight situation, Breen has to bash on doors and ask to use a phone. At the start of the novel, Breen has just lost his father, and his superiors are keen to use his bereavement as an excuse to get him off the case, especially when he asks awkward questions. He’s a likeable hero, ‘square’ in his conventional suits, attractive to women but shy of doing anything about his liking for Tozer. Their relationship is convincingly developed from the first novel, A Song from Dead Lips. The minor characters are vividly drawn: the predictable station boss, Bailey, the typist Marilyn and Breen’s fellow copper, Jones. Real events, like the John And Yoko ‘bedsheet’ concert, are woven into the story, and a key character is Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser,  modern art dealer and thrower of glamorous parties. The dual storyline – the MP’s son, and the death of a dead vagrant, possibly a labourer linking back to Breen’s Irish community – is cleverly plotted, and moves along at a brisk pace, with good action sequences and a satisfying finish.

A PP with interesting characters and a vividly realised 60s background. Highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Marsali Taylor

 William Shaw was born in Newton abbot, Devon, and grew up in Nigeria and lived for sixteen years in hackney. Starting out as assistant editor of the post-punk magazine ZigZag, he has been a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena and The Face and was Amazon UK Music Journalist of the Year in 2003. He is the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, about a year spent with the young men of South Central Los Angeles, and A Superhero For Hire, a compilation of columns in the Observer Magazine. A Song from Dead Lips is the first in a trilogy of crime fiction books set in London in 1968 – 1969. He lives in Brighton.

www.williamshaw.com

Marsali Taylor grew up near Edinburgh, and came to Shetland as a newly-qualified teacher. She is currently a part-time teacher on Shetland's scenic west side, living with her husband and two Shetland ponies. Marsali is a qualified STGA tourist-guide who is fascinated by history, and has published plays in Shetland's distinctive dialect, as well as a history of women's suffrage in Shetland. She's also a keen sailor who enjoys exploring in her own 8m yacht, and an active member of her local drama group.  Marsali also does a regular monthly column for the Mystery People e-zine.

‘The Man from Berlin’ by Luke McCallin

Published by No Exit Press,
27 November 2014. ISBN:  978-1-84344-547-0

Sarajevo (Bosnia) 1943. Captain Gregor Reinhardt is a military intelligence (Abwehr) officer serving with the German army military intelligence (the Abwehr) in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia (then one country). Reinhardt is by training and inclination a soldier who had won the Iron Cross (the highest German military decoration) in World War I. Subsequent to that he became a highly effective police detective in Berlin, so much that, once Hitler and the Nazis were in power and World War II was looming, the authorities pressured him to join the Gestapo. Never a Nazi sympathiser and sickened by the increasing violence and lawlessness of the regime, Reinhardt  joined the Abwehr instead where his detective skills stood him in good stead, and served in France, North Africa and, finally, Yugoslavia. It is in Yugoslavia that he is confronted with the brutality of the occupation in which not only the Nazis but their fascist accomplices the Croat Ustashe were responsible and with which Reinhardt himself has been on occasion, to his self-disgust, complicit. But when he is called upon to investigate the murders of a fellow Abwehr officer and the Croatian film maker Marija Vukic it is his detective skills that bring to him to realise there is more to those deaths than a simple act of revenge. It is Marija herself who is particularly puzzling: she was beautiful, sexually alluring and sexually voracious but was there a purpose to her promiscuity? And if so, can Reinhardt establish what that purpose without himself falling foul of his enemies among the German forces and the Ustashe? Reinhardt finds himself embroiled in the snakepit of rivalries in the Balkans while outside the city the largely ineffective Cetniks under Mihailovic and the far more effective Partisans under Josip Broz Tito are mounting growing resistance to the Germans and the Ustashe.

           

I recommend this book. The world portrayed by the author is undoubtedly stark and brutal but then so was the reality if not more so. Equally realistic is the virtual absence of women apart from the vampish and manipulative (and dead) Marija. And so many of the names of the towns and cities – Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Goradze – have resonances beyond World War II to the Balkan wars of the 1990s which adds extra depth to the narrative. Reinhardt himself is a complex character: not only because of his immediate problems, but because he is still grieving for his beloved wife Carolin who died before the war and for his son Friedrich missing presumed dead at the siege of Stalingrad. Reinhardt had become estranged from Friedrich because of the latter's childhood indoctrination while in the Hitler Youth with Nazi dogma but he is still Reinhardt's son and he has has reason to believe that Friedrich's experiences on the Eastern Front may have disillusioned him with Nazism.  The author will be continuing the story of Gregor Reinhardt in his next novel The Pale House, similarly set in Yugoslavia during Germany's retreat and final defeat.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Luke McCallin Luke McCallin was born in Oxford, grew up in Africa, was educated around the world, and has worked with the UN as a humanitarian relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to normal people put under abnormal pressures, inspiring a historical mystery series built around an unlikely protagonist, Gregor Reinhardt, a German intelligence officer and a former Berlin detective chased out of the police by the Nazis. The Man From Berlin was published in 2013, followed by a sequel, The Pale House, in 2014.

He lives with his wife and two children in an old farmhouse in France in the Jura Mountains. He has a master’s degree in political science, speaks French, is learning Spanish, and can just get by in Russian. When he’s not working or writing or spending time with his family, he enjoys reading history, playing squash, and keeping goal for the UN football team.

http://lukemccallin.com

‘Broadchurch’ by Erin Kelly

From the story by TV series creator Chris Chibnall

Published by Sphere in paperback,
14 August 2014.
ISBN: 978-0-7515-5558-5

It’s a slightly odd experience, reading a murder mystery novel and knowing whodunit before I even picked it up. There can’t be many fans of the genre who don’t know who killed Danny Latimer and left his body lying on the beach in the small Dorset town of Broadchurch back in the spring of 2013.

But no spoilers here, just in case there are still a few people who remain out of the loop.

Often TV tie-in novels are thin and unsatisfying without the actors to bring them to life. Not so here; Erin Kelly is an experienced novelist, and she has made an excellent job of translating Chris Chibnall’s tight scripts into prose fiction which gives as little away but is still as rich and absorbing as the drama. Fortunately there’s a lot more to it than a straightforward murder investigation; the meat of the narrative is the effect an event of this magnitude has on a small community where such things simply aren’t expected to happen. This element is explored on the page no less carefully and sensitively than on the screen; Kelly has the knack of drawing the reader in, to the extent that when I finally put the book down, I felt as if I had been part of the tragedy which assaulted the town.

The characters and location were already in place, of course, but Kelly has brought them to life on the page just as effectively as Chibnall and the team of actors and directors did on the screen; careful use of interior monologue has, if anything, added some complexity and made them even more real. By the end Broadchurch was a familiar place, and Beth and Mark, Ellie and Hardy, Maggie and Ollie, even Karen White the incomer journalist, were people I knew.

But knowing the end meant I needed a different approach from usual. What intrigued me about the TV series, and no less about the novel, was exactly how the viewer/reader was misdirected; it wasn’t till close to the end, when the pool of suspects was beginning to run dry, that I had the slightest inkling who the murderer was, and I was fascinated to know how that was achieved. It took a while, but eventually I sussed it. All the other major characters, suspects, police and all, are given their moments behind the camera: scenes which are related from their point of view. The murderer isn’t afforded this privilege until his/her identity has been revealed.

It’s subtly done, and I had to think about it and check carefully. And there are one or two moments which made me think, would someone with a murder on his/her conscience really react like that? But that was the case in the TV version as well, so it’s not down to Erin Kelly.

Taken all round, the book is at least as successful as the TV drama – and that’s saying a great deal.  

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Erin Kelly is a freelance journalist and lives in North London with her family. The Poison Tree was her first novel.

http://erinkelly.co.uk

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.

‘The Broken Places’ by Ace Atkins

Published by Constable Crime,
18 September 2014.
ISBN: 9781472112149

You can't blame folks who view a murderer's religious transformation from Bad Guy to Good Guy with scepticism.  So when Jamey Dixon, newly released from prison under a governor's amnesty, comes back to set up his own church in Jericho, Mississippi, many of the locals are understandably cynical.  Especially Sheriff Quinn Colson.  Especially when

Colson's very own daughter is under Dixon's spell.

The family of the victim is out for revenge.  Two vicious prisoners, who knew Dixon inside, have broken murderously out of jail, and are making their way  to Jericho, to catch up with their former mate, and the money they believe he has stashed away – their money.  And there's a tornado heading straight for town. 

But believe it or not, Jamie seems to have undergone a genuine conversion. Is anything going to happen to make him go 'batshit craz', as someone puts it?  Or will his new-found persona stay calm and kind.

When the tornado hits, the town is left stranded, without communication to the wider world.  No-one can get in or out, because the roads are washed away.  Darkness both literal and metaphorical, is falling on Jericho.  How many bodies will it take before Colson can sort it out and clean it up?  You'll have to read this great thriller to find out.

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Reviewer: Susan Moody

Ace Atkins is an experienced crime writer with several stand alones, a series about Nick Travers and his Quinn Coulson series which he continues to write. He has already published the Spenser Lullaby and is writing more Spensers. In an interview in 2013 he explained that he couldn't write the Coulson and Spenser books at the same time - he writes the two series separately allowing half a year for each!

Susan Moody was born and brought up in Oxford.  She has published over 30 crime and suspense novels, including the Penny Wanawake series and the Cassandra Swann bridge series.  She is a past Chairman of the British Crime Writers' Association, a member of the Detection Club, a past Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tasmania and a past President of the International Association of Crime Writers.  She divides her time between south-west France and south-east Kent.   Nominated for the CWA short story award.  Nominated for the RNA's award.