‘Fire Damage’ by Kate Medina

Published by Harper Collins,   

24 March 2016. 

ISBN 978 0 00 813226 6

This is a new series featuring Jessie Flynn an army psychologist with more problems than her patients. Jessie is asked to take on the case of 4 year old Sami, the son of Captain Nick Scott who has recently been injured in Afghanistan, injuries that have left him severely burned and blind in one eye. His son appears to be traumatised by it and Jessie tries to delve into what is behind the little boy's torment as she suspects it is more than just that his father looks so different.

While the main story focuses on Jessie trying to figure out what has happened to Sami, the plot also follows two other viewpoint threads. Local detective Bobby Simmons investigates the charred torso washed up on a Sussex beach, and Military Police Officer Ben Callan, a former patient of Jessie's, investigates the murder of an Intelligence Officer in Afghanistan. While for the most part this is quite a leisurely read the ending is face-paced and powerful, bringing together the threads in an unexpected and satisfying way.

The themes of this book revolve around the issues of war with the Middle East but deal with the effects of army life on both the soldiers and their families and the injustice of what happens when they are no longer fit for duty.

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Reviewer Christine Hammacott

Kate Medina while studying for a degree in Psychology, joined the Territorial Army where she spent five years, first as an officer trainee and then as a Troop Commander in the Royal Engineers.

She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and now writes full time. Her debut novel, White Crocodile (published under the name K. T. Medina), a thriller set in the minefields of Cambodia, received widespread critical acclaim.

Christine Hammacott lives near Southampton and runs her own design consultancy. She started her career working in publishing as a book designer and now creates covers for indie-authors. She writes page-turning fiction that deals with the psychological effects of crime. Her debut novel The Taste of Ash was published in 2015.

‘Blood Torment’ by T F Muir

Published by Constable,
12 May 2016. 

ISBN: 978-1-47212-116-5

The earlier titles in T F Muir’s St Andrews-based series featuring DCI Andy Gilchrist have been characterized by their setting amid the glorious eastern Scotland landscape, and plenty of blood and violence.

                                     

The landscape is still in evidence in this latest in the series, but this time he has opted to pull back from the gory details, give or take the odd axe murder and beating with a hammer. The blood in the title is used in the sense of family, and the violence is largely emotional.

A small child disappears, and it’s soon plain she has been abducted. Gilchrist’s investigation reveals a wealthy, high-profile extended family which takes dysfunctional to a whole new level, and not one of them is vouchsafing any useful information. Gilchrist has his own methods of digging for evidence, but this time it proves to be well buried.

Meanwhile, Gilchrist’s own personal life is threatening to fall to pieces around him. His pregnant lover, the ice-queen pathologist Rebecca Cooper, has gone quiet on him; his artist son finds himself embroiled in the murder of a violent drug dealer whom Gilchrist has encountered professionally himself; a corrupt detective has a hold over him; even his adopted cat is keeping its distance. Gilchrist does his best to be an understanding partner and father, but finds it all more than a little bewildering – especially when his career is on the line if the missing child doesn’t turn up.

Mean streets and St Andrews don’t seem to match in real life, but Muir succeeds in making the darker side of a beautiful place feel very real indeed. Likewise his leading characters: Gilchrist is a sharp, intuitive detective but lacks perception and strength in his private life; his sidekick DS Jessie Janes is tactless and mouthy but self-aware and soft-centred. The bad guys do seem to be quite unremitting, with no visible redeeming features, but that goes with the ‘tartan noir’ territory. And of course it all comes right in the end, albeit with enough loose ends to suggest that Muir is far from done with it all.

Blood Torment shows a different side to T F Muir’s writing, and thus broadens the remit of the   series as well as extending its length.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

T F Muir Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Frank was plagued from a young age with the urge to see more of the world than the rain sodden slopes of the Campsie Fells.  By the time he graduated from University with a degree he hated, he’d already had more jobs than the River Clyde has bends.  Short stints as a lumberjack in the Scottish Highlands and a moulder’s labourer in the local foundry convinced Frank that his degree was not such a bad idea after all.  Thirty-plus years of living and working overseas helped him appreciate the raw beauty of his home country.  Now a dual US/UK citizen, Frank makes his home in the outskirts of Glasgow, from where he visits St Andrews regularly to carry out some serious research in the old grey town’s many pubs and restaurants.  Frank is working hard on his next novel, another crime story suffused with dark alleyways and cobbled streets and some things gruesome.

http://www.frankmuir.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 Insect Farm’ by Stuart Prebble

Published by Alma Books,
10 February, 2016. 
ISBN 978-1-84688-389-7

The book starts with the discovery of two badly decomposed bodies in a shed on an allotment. The bodies have been ravaged by insects. Who are these people? What has happened to them? And how did they get there? These are the suspense premises of the story that keep the reader hooked.

Set in the early 1970s, the book is split into two halves with the first half devoted to the history of the relationship between Jonathan Maguire and his brother Roger.

Roger is a high functioning autistic who appears to have little understanding of the world around him. His obsession is the insect farm, which he has built since childhood in a shed on the allotment. While Roger can barely get himself dressed in the morning, he can relate facts about the insects in his world with incredible recall and minute detail.

Jonathan is the younger sibling, who after the mysterious death of their parents is forced to leave university to look after Roger. Jonathan’s own obsession is his girlfriend Harriet. Harriet is beautiful and admired by men but by one in particular. When Jonathan leaves university he is forced into a long-distance relationship with Harriet and this fuels his obsessive lack of trust in her and results in murder.

The themes of the book are complex and interesting. They revolve around the ideas of trust, jealousy and the lengths we will go to for our obsessions. The story explores the affects of disability on family life and the idea of how much someone with autism can actually comprehend and the decisions they are capable of.

This is a book you will probably either love or hate and the reviews on Amazon, which are split to the extremes, rather prove that. The story is narrated retrospectively by Jonathan. His detachment and meticulous attention to detail seem to imply that he might have Asperger Syndrone, also in the autistic spectrum. The resulting style of narration has the effect of making it feel more like a literary novel and this may be one of the reasons why reader's responses are so mixed.

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Reviewer Christine Hammacott

Stuart Prebble. Apart from being one of the leading broadcasters and producers of his generation, is an acclaimed writer of fiction and non-fiction. Among his publications are two novels, five comedy books based on the Grumpy Old Men TV series which he produced and, more recently, a book about the Falklands War, Secrets of the Conqueror, published by Faber and Faber in 2012. The Insect Farm is his latest novel.

Christine Hammacott lives near Southampton and runs her own design consultancy. She started her career working in publishing as a book designer and now creates covers for indie-authors. She writes page-turning fiction that deals with the psychological effects of crime. Her debut novel The Taste of Ash was published in 2015.

Crimes by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa 

Published by Maclehose Press,
6 August 2015.
ISBN: 978-0-85705-315-2

Venezuelan Alberto Barrera Tyszka tells stories about crimes, some of which are very violent, and looks at their effects on people's minds as they suffer pangs of conscience. 

These stories are full of violence both overt and hidden within people's minds.  Violence could be said to be more present in Latin America than elsewhere and Alberto is illustrating the obvious and insidious effects.  The visceral references which surface at intervals shock but so do the frightening  areas within the consciences of the protagonists and the ultimate banality of these individuals.  The ten stories vary tremendously but all feature a person, male or female, who finds him or herself worrying about a situation that may involve a crime but always involves feelings of guilt.  Some tales are surreal, for example the man who is developing a compulsion to bite dogs or the man who finds a severed hand and tries to inform the authorities but is told "no hand was reported missing last night. Sorry.".  Others start from the obvious - Aranguren volunteers in a prison teaching a creative writing class and experiences the smell of criminality in the air.   In Alberto's stories lives are changed forever by violence but it is the indirect effects that linger in the mind rather than the direct ones; a family see a relative apparently shot during a demonstration and cannot find him afterwards, they are then caught up in the political and media ramifications that follow.

The stories are often quite short and expressed in clear, simple prose, however, certain memorable uses of language stay in your mind.  A bullet is referred to as"capricious" as it disappears into a body deciding to inhabit it; two boys are disappointed when the guerrilla father of one of them returns and proves to be bald, small and unathletic, they look at each other and see that  "his father, all too soon, had ceased to be a myth."  This is writing of a high standard and, presumably, translating of an equally high level.

The stories certainly held my interest!

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Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

Alberto José Barrera Tyszka, was born 18 February 1960 in Caracas Venezuela where he grew up.  He graduated from the Central University of Venezuela, where he is now a professor in the Department of Literature.  He is a regular columnist (since 1996) for the daily newspaper El Nacional, and a regular contributor to the magazine Letras Libres. In 2006, he received the Herralde Prize for his novel La enfermedad.  
He has published four novels, a poetry collection, and three books of history.Barrera's works have been translated into Mandarin, French, English, and Italian.

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.