‘Killing for Keeps’ by Mari Hannah

Published by Macmillan,
4 December 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-4472-4611-4

Mari Hannah’s DCI Kate Daniels has just been optioned for TV, which is excellent news for anyone who enjoys action-packed police drama with a feisty female cop in the leading role. Killing for Keeps, the fifth in the series, has great telly potential; it moves outside the confines of Kate’s Northumbrian ‘manor’, and features a couple of charismatic villains as well as the usual suspects in the Murder Investigation Team.

Hannah doesn’t flinch from the gruesome stuff either; the investigation is triggered by the discovery of two tortured murder victims, who prove to be brothers, and the sons of a notorious gang leader, responsible in his day for a large proportion of the organized crime on Kate Daniels’s patch.

The maverick cop is a staple of crime fiction, and Kate Daniels is as maverick as they come – and not just because she’s a lesbian. She is never afraid to go it alone and work outside the system, though she goes to some lengths to protect her team from the consequences of her own rule-breaking.

The case moves ahead in fits and starts, and keeps stalling as one lead after another takes the detectives nowhere. Meanwhile, Kate herself is in a bad way. Already exhausted after another trying investigation, she is still not quite coming to terms with the breakdown of her relationship with psychological profiler Jo Soulsby, and both her former boss and mentor DCS Bright and her work partner Hank Gormley begin to worry for her health, both physical and mental – especially when she begins to feel responsible for the fate of an informant she hasn’t even admitted exists.

Maintaining the pace and keeping the pages turning in these circumstances is no mean feat, but Mari Hannah is well up to the task. She knows her locations inside-out, and ensures the reader does too. Her knowledge of MIT procedure is second to none, but the detailed research is worn lightly; the reader is made party to everything that goes on in the murder room via the well-drawn diverse personalities of the detectives.

Killing for Keeps is a first-class addition to the series.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Mari Hannah was born in London. She now lives in a small Northumberland village with her partner, a former murder detective. Mari became a writer after her career as a Probation Officer was cut short following an assault on duty. She began using a computer because it was too painful to write with a pen. Ironically, the idea that she might one day become a writer then began to form in her head.  She tried different forms of writing before settling on prose, and spent several years scriptwriting. She then  turned her attention to the BBC, pitching a television serial based on characters in her then unfinished debut crime novel The Murder Wall. After completing the TV script, she went back to the book she had started years before but somehow never thought she’d finish.

 http://www.marihannah.com

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.

'Dark Dawn' and 'When Sorrows Come' by Matt McGuire

Two Novels by Matt McGuire reviewed by Radmila May

Both these novels feature Detective Sergeant John O’Neill of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). They belong to the tough city, tough cop, tough villain genre of crime writing. Of that genre they are taut well-written examples. Although some of the characters achieve some sort of redemption, the portrayal of post-Troubles Belfast,  where chronic alcoholism and all-pervasive drug abuse provide the warp and weft of a gloomy tapestry, is bleak and dark.

‘Dark Dawn’ by Matt McGuire.

Published by Constable and Robinson. 2012.

ISBN: 978-1-78033-2253 (trade pb)

Belfast 2005. By a building site near the River Lagan a young boy lies dead, beaten to death. No name, nothing to identify him. This is  O’Neill’s his first case as Principal Investigating Officer, a tough call since some of his seniors want him to fail in order to justify sending him back to the uniformed branch or even getting him out of the PSNI altogether. But, although the Troubles are over, the violence and gang-beatings continue, now a feature of the drugs-related criminality into which all too many of Belfast’s inhabitants have been sucked ranging from youthful drug dealers like the young hoodies Marty and Petesy to the business interests who are making a fortune out of the city’s rebuilding. Meanwhile, Joe Lynch, former hitman for the IRA, is back in Belfast, unemployable because of his record, unable to settle, not knowing what he wants from life except that he does not want be drawn into the gang violence that has replaced the sectarian violence that had forged his reputation as a hard man. But it is because of that reputation that the gangs want him.

           

‘When Sorrows Come’ by Matt McGuire

Published by Constable and Robinson. 2014.

ISBN: 978-1-78033-823-3

Belfast again, some years later. In the aptly-named Tomb Street another young man dies, this time from knife wounds. His identity is known - Jonathan McCarthy, trainee solicitor and only son of the prosperous businessman Richard McCarthy; consequently a very high profile murder and one which O’Neill, who has been assigned to the case, is under pressure from Chief Inspector Wilson to solve quickly. O’Neill’s colleague Inspector Ward, nearing retirement but still devoted to the job, is more understanding of the complexities. Ward, however, is still seething with resentment at the terms of the Good Friday Agreement which brought the Troubles to an end although the tremors caused by the still existing fault lines constantly rumble below Belfast’s growing prosperity. And, unknown to anyone, Ward has been receiving threatening communications in the form of sympathy cards as has his old friend and former colleague Pat Kennedy. They both suspect that behind the cards is major-drug supplier Johnny Tierney. And behind Tierney is the crime-lord Gerry McCann. Ward and Kennedy would dearly like to nail both McCann and Tierney. Meanwhile the young hoodies Marty and Petesy reappear. Marty is still dealing drugs supplied by Tierney but he would like to avenge the injuries to his friend Petesy who was crippled in a beating by Tierney (not to mention setting up as an independent drug dealer): a highly risky enterprise but one in which Marty, full of hubris, thinks he can succeed. And while O’Neill and Ward are determined, whatever the risk to themselves, to unravel whatever it was that Jonathan McCarthy was involved in, at the same time O’Neill has to cope with the aftermath of the break-up of his marriage, the hostility of his wife Catherine and the difficulties of maintaining contact with his young daughter Sarah.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Matt McGuire was born 1981 in Belfast, Matt has worked as a barman, an encyclopaedia salesman, and since 2006, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of a number of non-fiction books, including Contemporary Scottish Literature (Macmillan, 2009) and editor of The Everyman Book of Irish Poems (Random House, 2011).

‘A Handful of Ash’ by Marsali Taylor

Published by Accent Press Ltd,
27 Jun. 2014.
ISBN-13: 978-1783755127

  

After running away from home to sea when she was sixteen, Cass  Lynch has now returned to Shetland, reconciled with her parents, and is now living on her boat Khalida moored in Scalloway, while she studies at college for qualifications so that she can be an officer on tall ships. She has taken a part-time gardening job to support herself while studying.

On an evening walk, Cass finds the body of a young girl.  There are no obvious signs of the cause of death, but her hands are smeared with peat ash, which Cass finds strange.   Reporting the death to the police brings Gavin back into her life - every cloud has a silver lining!

With Halloween approaching, rumours of witches in Scalloway seemingly spring from nowhere.  When Cass hears that she is being called a witch, she initially dismisses it, but the rumours seem to have taken hold. Then she then runs into three young goths who threaten her and her beloved Cat. And when a college friend says that his great granny is in a state as last night she saw Auld Clootie (the Devil), Cass decides to visit her.

A second death found in the manner of the method used in the seventeen century to deal with witches in Shetland’s ancient capital, has Cass off to the library to do some investigation. 

I enjoyed this book enormously, although I have to admit that the sailing aspect went over my head, but the mystery itself held me enthralled.  The suspects are numerous, and kept me guessing.  When the murderer is revealed it was satisfying to see that the clues were all there for the amateur sleuth, provided you are a student of human nature.  It is so often weakness, and pride that bring about one’s downfall.

There are some marvellous characters, I particularly love Cass’s mother.  And the return of the charismatic Anders added an extra spice to Cass’s personal life. I look forward avidly to the next in the series. Highly recommended.

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Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes

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.

‘A Trick of the Mind’ by Penny Hancock

Published by Simon & Schuster,
11 September, 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-47111-507-3 (HB)

Penny Hancock’s previous psychological thrillers have each been set close to the River Thames, where the seedier parts of London border on to respectable middle class residential areas.

Trick of the Mind opens in a pretty Norfolk seaside town, and but for one blot on the landscape, all is sunshine and light.

The blot is a hit-and-run accident. Ellie, the artist protagonist, is afraid that the branch she thought she collided with during her blustery drive down to the town was actually something much worse. A local news item confirms her fears, she decides to confront her ‘victim’, and from then on nothing in her life is the same.

Hancock has a great talent for creating layers. The action soon shifts to her familiar territory of riverside London; the river’s deceptively calm, smooth surface and its seething currents and trapped detritus waiting to emerge from its depths become a metaphor for Ellie’s life.

Ellie herself is talented, feisty, and a little damaged by the past. The new lifestyle she is drawn into has its attractions, and at first it’s hard for the reader to understand how a bright, independent young woman can fail to pick up the many clues which point out that she is being deceived.  But denial is a way of guarding ourselves against unacceptable truths, and Ellie’s situation is only an extension of that instinct for self-protection. It’s all as plain as day to the sparky bohemian friends who have shared her life for many years, but by the time Ellie sees what’s really happening, she can’t see a way out. And that’s the truly scary thing.

Background is Hancock’s great talent; the river and seaside backgrounds are so well-drawn that you can almost smell the way the air changes from one location to the other. No less real are her characters, from Ellie herself and charismatic Patrick, who is quite definitely not what he seems, through Ellie’s idiosyncratic family and friends, right down to six-year-old Timothy and Larry, the child in a fifty-year-old body. Even May, the dead aunt whose seaside house Ellie has inherited, and Pepper the dog are sharp and clear.

If there’s one flaw, it’s this: a struggling artist who has just earned her first commission surviving in London on the salary of a part-time teacher requires disbelief to be suspended just a little too far. But I suspended it far enough to avoid being distracted from the book’s many qualities.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Penny Hancock. After several years in London, Penny Hancock now lives in Cambridge with her husband and three children. She is a part-time primary school teacher at a speech and language school and has travelled extensively as a language teacher.

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.