‘Persona Non Grata’ by Timothy Williams

Published by Soho Crime,
8 January 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-6169-5464-2

Northern Italy, 1985. Commissario Piero Trotti is called out to an unusual case: a young girl has been attacked in her bed. Her father’s able to ID the suspect – or at least the photofit he comes up with looks very like someone he has reason to dislike.

This fast-moving Italian PP follows Trotti as he searches for the truth in this case and in the old story of his brother’s death during the war. Verging on retirement, Trotti is admirable for his integrity and work ethic, and you sympathise with his loneliness now his wife has left him and his daughter’s absorbed in student life, but you can also see why he’s the persona non grata of the station – he drives his lieutenants hard on the boring work, and won’t let them do any of the fun stuff. The minor characters are also well-drawn: the quarrelsome Baronessa who looks after Trotti’s friend Fra Gianni, feminist and loyal officer Ciuffi, disenchanted Pisanelli. The short chapters keep the plot moving briskly, with plenty of twists, and the perp to each case is a neatly-convincing surprise. The Italian atmosphere is beautifully done: the colours, sounds, smells are described until you can feel the heat rising from the pages, and Williams’ stylish dialogue is a delight.

A stylish, atmospheric thriller. It reads well as a stand-alone, but you might like to start with the first in the Trotti series, Converging Parallels.

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Reviewer: Marsali Taylor

Timothy Williams was born 1946, in Walthamstoe, Essex. He attended Woodford Green Preparatory School, Chigwell School and St Andrews University. He has previously lived in France, Italy, and in Romania, where he worked for the British Council. He  is a bilingual British author who has written five novels in English featuring Commissario Piero Trotti, a character critics have referred to as a personification of modern Italy.

www.timothywilliams.uk.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.

‘Prison Noir’ edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by Turnaround,
30 October 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-6177-5239-1

This is an anthology of short stories focused on the experience of prisoners in U.S. jails. With an introduction by the editor, I learned for the first time the scale of the U.S. justice system - the U.S. locks up nearly 25% of the world’s prison population, despite accounting for just 5% of the world population. That means 2.2 million individuals in American prisons at any one time.

Against that background it's no wonder that the underlying themes threaded through many of the short stories in the anthology are of despair, loneliness and the challenges of living in an overcrowded, heavily controlled environment. In all the narratives, the day-to-day reality of life behind bars is described in a casual, normalised way. There is no emphasis on the lack of privacy or prevalence of violence, for example. These are presented by every author without exception as unremarkable, a given, a part of prison life. Far from being glossed over, it is more that they are simply part of the background fabric of life in prison.

A few of the authors are worth particular mention. In Shuffle, Christopher M Stephen subtly and sensitively explores the impact of solitary confinement on mental health, while Foxhole by BM Dolarman navigates the relationships between prisoners in an honest, unstylised manner that rings all the truer for it and makes his tragic conclusion that someday he'll end up on death row, all the more upsetting. In A Message in the Breath of Allah, there is a sense of poetic justice as the juxtaposition of Ali F Sareini's protagonist, Ali's faith in Allah and his contrary behaviour, seems to bring about his own demise. The strength of his faith also creates a sense of lack of choice, another theme that is woven throughout the anthology, perhaps particularly true of Milk and Tea by Linda Michelle Marquardt, whose unnamed heroine, a woman abused by her husband who finds herself in jail for a crime passionel.

To say I enjoyed this anthology would be misrepresenting the experience. Better would be to say that I couldn't put it down. Some characters were naturally more sympathetic than others, but the desolation of their experiences, equal in the eyes of the law, was moving. For an eye-opening read that will have you questioning the role incarceration plays in the justice system, through the words of those who have experienced it first-hand, you couldn't do better than this.

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Reviewer: Joanna Kennedy

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and is the editor of New Jersey Noir.

Joanna Kennedy studied French and German at university. She works in the aerospace industry and is a chartered marketer in the UK. She describes herself as a voracious reader, enjoying genres as varied as crime thrillers, historical fiction and autobiographies. Joanna lives in London. She is the daughter of crime thriller writer Leigh Russell.

‘The Furnace of Hell’ by Richard Wilson and John Wilson

Published by Matador,
28 November 2015.
ISBN: 978-1-78462-025-7

Undeterred by their prior experiences of international adventure and misadventure, Hardington Tachman and his wife Mei Li set off to West Africa for a new life.

Drawn unwillingly into the religious confrontations between Christians and Muslims, the couple are also disturbed by the ongoing practice of juju (local witchcraft) and the harsh punishments meted out to locals and foreigners alike for what, by their western standards, seem to be minor infractions. When Mei Li goes missing, Hardtack is distraught. But not as devastated as when she reappears on a mysterious and dangerous mission, suffering from amnesia and with no memory of her husband...

Hardtack is a cross between the adventuring spirit of Lee Child's Jack Reacher, if Jack had family ties and roots of any sort, and Dan Brown's academic Robert Langdon, thrown into the sort of situations that Indiana Jones might relish.

When I realised this was the second in a series, I was initially concerned that I would find it hard to pick up the story. The authors immediately set my mind at rest with a précis in the first couple of chapters so I would reassure all potential readers that, even if they hadn't read the first book, this novel is eminently enjoyable.

The story is well-paced, the colourful descriptions of life in various locations around the world suggest painstaking research and the characters are sympathetic. A thumping good read

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Reviewer: Joanna Kennedy

Richard Wilson is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. A graduate of Princeton University, he is the author of numerous books and articles. Before beginning his career in academia, he worked on Wall Street and served as an Intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy.

John Wilson was Assistant Dean at Harvard Law School, Associate Dean at Boston University School of Law and Dean and Professor of Law at Golden Gate University School of Law, San Francisco.

Joanna Kennedy  studied French and German at university. She works in the aerospace industry and is a chartered marketer in the UK. She describes herself as a voracious reader, enjoying genres as varied as crime thrillers, historical fiction and autobiographies. Joanna lives in London. She is the daughter of crime thriller writer Leigh Russell.

‘The Whispering City’ by Sara Moliner

Published by Abacus,
5 February 2015.
ISBN: 975-0-349-13993-7

Barcelona 1952. Spain is under the iron grip of the dictator Franco after a bitter civil war between the Republicans, largely left-wing and including Communists and anarchists, and the right-wing Falange, fascist and also clericalist. With the aid of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Falange vanquished the Republicans and then proceeded to exact a brutal revenge against their defeated opponents. Those who were not executed and buried in mass graves or imprisoned found it virtually impossible to find work and could only survive by hand-to-mouth methods. Members of Republican families were discriminated against and often persecuted. Poverty and fear of the violent methods used by the authorities (particularly the police) ruled; dissent was met with imprisonment or death. Employment opportunities for women were particularly limited.

           

So Ana Marti Noguer, whose father’s liberal sympathies had made it impossible for him to continue as a journalist, is fortunate to find work on the newspaper Vanguardia albeit reporting only social events. Until, that is, she is assigned to the police investigation by Inspector Isidro Castro of the wealthy socialite widow, Mariona Sobrerroca. It would suit the authorities if the murder could be pinned on some unknown burglar. However, Ana finds a cache of love letters to Mariona and when she and her cousin, the reclusive scholar and philologist Beatriz who is also a victim of the prevailing anti-liberal atmosphere, it seems first of all that the letter writer may have been responsible for Mariona’s murder and then that the letters are both more and less than they had seemed to be at the outset. Their initial investigations, while they answer some of their questions, raise yet more, and with each new discovery the two women are drawn further and further into danger. Most of their friends and associates are too afraid to support them; only another cousin, the young lawyer Pablo Noguer, will stand with them.

Sara Moliner is in fact a pseudonym for two people: Rosa Ribas and Sabine Hoffman. They have written an excellent and most interesting first novel which not only illustrates a recent and important episode in Europe’s recent past but provides a fascinating and intricate puzzle. Strongly recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Sara Moliner is the collaborative pseudonym of author Rosa Ribas and Sabina Hoffman, a former professor of philology. The Whispering City is their first novel, which has received critical acclaim since its publication in Spain, as well as an English Pen Award.

 

Radmila May  was born in the US but has lived in the UK ever since 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 has been working for them off and on ever since. For the last few years she has been one of three editors working on a new edition of a practitioners' text book on Criminal Evidence by her late husband, publication of which has been held up for a variety of reasons but hopefully will be published by the end of 2015. She also has an interest in archaeology in which subject she has a Diploma.