‘Black Water’ by Louise Doughty

Published by Faber & Faber,
2 June 2016.
ISBN: 978-0-32355-5 (HB)

Louise Doughty has done it again – written a novel that is totally different to her previous seven (She has also written non-fiction book – A Novel in a Year…highly recommended) and yet just as compelling. I tell everyone I can about Apple Tree Yard, I will be doing the same for her latest offering.

Black Water is an emotionally fraught thriller that moves between Cold War Europe, the Civil Rights era in California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the military dictatorship that followed. In the morally complex book Louise Doughty explores race, grief, the family and politics.

John Harper is haunted by the brutal actions he committed as a sometime mercenary. The beginning of Black Water finds him holed up in a remote hut on a tropical island listening to the sound of ghekkoes and rain on the roof. He thinks he is in danger, but he is more afraid of what he has done in the past than what’s going to happen in the future. He meets Rita in a local town – a woman who has her own demons to fight. They cautiously begin an affair. Can the two of them find comfort and redemption in each other?

Louise Doughty is so good at building the tension in her novels deliciously slowly and quietly, teasing the reader, and Black Water is no different. Through flashbacks, and not necessarily in order, we are able to piece together Harper’s past and the source of his guilt.

We go from his unconventional and traumatic birth, through his unusual upbringing and onto the part he plays in the Jakarta uprising in 1965 (of which I had very little knowledge) and see how the effects from these events ripple through the rest of his life. The bad things people inflict upon one another and how they justify them to themselves and others is a theme that runs through the book. Powerful and gripping, Black Water will resonate with me for some time to come.

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Reviewer: Mary-Jane Riley

Louise Doughty was born in Melton Mowbray and grew up in Rutland. She is an alumna of Leeds University and of the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, headed by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. In 2006, Doughty contributed a weekly column to The Daily Telegraph inviting readers to write a Novel in a Year, and the following year a weekly column on the life of a writer entitled "A Writer's Year". Doughty has also presented radio programmes for the BBC on literature, and was a judge for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. She also writes radio plays. She lives in London.

Mary-Jane Riley wrote her first story on her newly acquired blue Petite typewriter. She was eight. It was about a gang of children who had adventures on mysterious islands, but she soon realised Enid Blyton had cornered that particular market. So she wrote about the Wild West instead. When she grew up she had to earn a living, and became a BBC radio talk show presenter and journalist. She has covered many life-affirming stories, but also some of the darkest events of the past two decades.
Then, in true journalistic style, she decided not to let the facts get in the way of a good story and got creative. She wrote for women's magazines and small presses. She formed WriteOutLoud with two writer friends to help charities get their message across using their life stories. Now she is writing psychological suspense, drawing on her experiences in journalism.
The Bad Things by Mary-Jane Riley was published by Harper Collins/Killer Reads. Her second book, After She Fell, also published by Killer Reads, is out on April 28th.
In her spare time Mary-Jane likes to walk the dog and eat a lot. Good job she likes walking.

‘A Hero in France’ by Alan Furst

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2 June 2016. 
ISBN:978 1 474 60290 7 (HB)

It is spring 1941 and Paris and much of France is under Nazi occupation apart from Vichy France where the former Premier of France, Marechal Petain, has traded immunity from occupation for compliance with the German authorities. Britain is the only nation standing against Hitler, and, although British bombers are raiding Germany nightly, many aircraft are being shot down. Some of their pilots and crew parachute into the Occupied Zone and manage to contact small groups of men and women who have organised escape lines which lead out of the country and back to Britain. These formed the French Resistance. One such escape route is in Paris and is led by a man known as Mathieu (not his real name); its members include students, teachers, shopkeepers, night club owners, priests, aristocrats, even officials who are prepared to supply the appropriate paperwork to enable escapees to get to Vichy France, usually by rail, and from Vichy to Spain, Fascist but neutral. The escapees are given appropriate clothing and are accompanied by members of the Resistance who guide them along their way and protect them so far as possible from discovery particularly since the airmen either spoke no French or had unmistakeable British accents. All the Resistance members are in literally deadly danger and Mathieu’s role, as organiser is particularly vital. However, in Germany, the authorities are aware of the activities of the Resistance and the way in which they are organising the escape of downed British airmen. Feeling that the French police are not as effective as they might be in dealing with the situation, they despatch Senior Inspector Otto Broehm to Paris to oversee the French police. Broehm’s plan is to plant a mole into Mathieu’s network. At the same time, the British contact Mathieu to say that they are considering putting in some of their own agents and will supply sorely-needed funds but Mathieu, fearing that the British will try and influence his network, is dubious.

Although there were resistance networks in other countries, such as Belgium, Denmark and Holland, and later on, as the war continued, in other countries, the French Resistance is far and away the best known. The author has provided an exciting and well-written narrative with a tightly controlled plot and numerous characters. Recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Alan Furst has lived for long periods in France, especially in Paris, and has travelled as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has written extensively for Esquire and the International Herald Tribune.

www.alanfurst.net

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.

‘The Salt Marsh’ by Clare Carson

Published by Head of Zeus,
16 June 2016.
ISBN: 978178408093 (HB)

Jim Coyle was an undercover policeman for the Metropolitan Police. Or something. In that shadowy world he inhabited his family were never sure exactly what he did or where he was or what he was doing in his frequent unexplained absences. It undermined his marriage. And sometimes his work impinged directly on members of his family as when, in 1978, he took his 11-year-old daughter Sam to a spring fair and while his back is turned a strange man speaks to Sam with a warning, incomprehensible but sinister and  tries to stop her from following her father. Jim is angry and upset but refuses to explain.

In 1984 he is shot dead in London, near Vauxhall Bridge, his death covered up, and Sam is traumatised by this and cannot recover despite weekly telephone counselling sessions. She feels that she is under constant surveillance and cannot escape that nor yet the demons which, waking and sleeping, plague her. Sam’s mother, however, appear to be much less affected by Jim’s death and has a new man in her life; Sam feels that she is the only one truly grieving for Jim. On her way to Dungeness where she plans to meet her boyfriend, like her a political activist, Luke, Sam visits Jim’s grave and leaves one of his surveillance diaries on his grave; then changes her mind, returns to collect the diary, and finds it still there. But someone has been looking at it. And when she gets to Dungeness Luke isn’t there. And he never does turn up. What has happened to him?

An old colleague of her father’s warns her that, because of her being involved with a planned demonstration against the Dungeness nuclear power station, a secret service file has been opened on her which could result in her being classified as a terrorist. More and more, as Sam searches for Luke, a morass of incomprehensible menace envelopes her.

This first novel is a highly assured debut. Recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May.

Clare Carson is an anthropologist who has worked for many years in international development. She lived in rural Zimbabwe when she was doing fieldwork for her PhD and has also lived and worked in the United States. She now lives on the south coast of England with her husband and two daughters. Her first book, Orkney Twilight, is a thriller about a daughter who wants to find out about her father’s life as an undercover cop.

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.

‘Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories’ by Mary Higgins Clark

Published by Simon & Schuster,
14 January 2016.
ISBN: 978-1-4711-4322-9

This book of short stories actually begins with a novella with the same title as the book itself. Janice Broad's sister Alexandra seems to have disappeared. She even neglected to collect her luggage on arrival at the airport after travelling from a modelling assignment.

The agency she works for is very anxious to find her as the commercial she is appearing in for a new beauty mask is nearing the deadline for its completion, can she be found before they lose the contract?

The next story is Stowaway which tells of a young lad escapee from the regime in Danubia hiding on a plane and how he makes a bid for freedom to Frankfurt.

This is followed by When the Bough Breaks, in which we meet Marion who is haunted by guilt of the death of her son three months before.

Voices in the Coalbin is a creepy of Laurie who was brought up by a grandmother who used to terrify her with stories of people who lived in the coalbin and the effect it has on her later on in life.

The Cape Cod Masquerade tells of a couple Alvira and Willy who have recently won forty million dollars on the lottery. She becomes an amateur sleuth and has helped to solve past crimes. When they rent a cottage on Cape Cod she thinks she recognises the neighbour next door as a woman wrongly accused of murdering her stepfather. She sets about helping her to find an elusive witness who never came forward and can prove her innocence.

Definitely a Crime of Passion tells of ex-president Henry Britland and how he tries to prove that Tommy, his former secretary of state is innocent of the murder of his lover Arabella.

The Man Next Door is a chilling story of a serial killer and how he sets about trapping his next victim who happens to live next door to him.

Haven’t We Met Before relates how an inhabitant of a hospital for the criminally insane, William Koenig believes he has been reincarnated several times and how it affects his life leading to at least ten murders. Jack Carroll a District Attorney believes he is not criminally insane and sets about to prove it.

The Funniest Thing Has Been Happening Lately tells of Fred Rand setting out to murder four people he considers responsible for the death of his eighteen year old daughter fifteen years ago.

The final and shortest story is The Tell Tale Purr, a black comedy about a grandson plotting to kill his grandmother for her money.

I'm not usually too keen on short stories but I thoroughly enjoyed these. A real mixture of themes ending on an amusing one to lighten the mood. I must thank Lizzie for introducing me to Mary Higgins Clark, she's brilliant.

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Reviewer: Tricia Chappell

Mary Higgins Clark is the author of twenty-two worldwide bestselling works of fiction and a memoir. She lives in Saddle River, New Jersey, with her husband.

Tricia Chappell. I have a great love of books and reading, especially crime and thrillers. I play the occasional game of golf  (when I am not reading). My great love is cruising especially to far flung places, when there are long days at sea for plenty more reading! I am really enjoying reviewing books and have found lots of great new authors.