‘Moorland Blue’ by Charlie Gibb

Published by The Book Guild,
28 February 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-257585-5

In London property developers Paul and Solley hear of a large remote property for sale in Yorkshire. A supposedly reliable associate of theirs informs them that the HS2 railway is to pass close by. As no one else seems to have this information, the property, an old TB sanatorium, are going really cheap. The pair see an ideal opportunity to make a fortune. They intend turning the building into apartments and building houses on the large estate. However, unbeknown to them the property has a dark past in many ways. One is a connection with the Nazis after the war. They travel up to Yorkshire to inspect their proposed development.

Meanwhile other characters are also interested in the property for different reasons. A Councillor, Roberts, Head of Planning has reason to keep the history of the place quiet, so when certain files go missing concerning the sanatorium he panics, and heads roll.

At the same time a particularly vicious gang boss also needs to keep its history a secret, and so begins a frantic search for the missing file, all completely unknown to Paul and Solley.

It's not long before they realise that all is not as it should be, especially when they visit the creepy sanatorium which has been empty for years and find recent footprints. When Paul then is sure he sees a face at an upper window, they are determined to find out what is going on and wonder what they have got themselves involved in. They have no idea what a great surprise awaits them when they start to explore the basements, and an even bigger one awaits the gang leader and his henchmen.

This is almost a black comedy as the main characters blunder from one crisis to another. Especially as Paul and Solley have no idea who they are really dealing with and are not used to coming up against a vicious gang leader and a thoroughly corrupt Councillor, both bent on getting their own way.

I feel this would make a good film entitled “Carry on Crime”! Recommended.

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Reviewer: Tricia Chappell

Charlie Gibb was raised and educated in North London. He later moved to Carrbridge, a small village in the Highlands of Scotland with his family, where he set up his own business. Charlie first created short stories for his children and since becoming semi-retired, he has had the time to concentrate on his writing.

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.

‘Envy’ by Amanda Robson

Published by Avon,
21 March 2019.
ISBN: 978-0-00-829187-7 (PB)

It was the children I felt sorry for, caught in a mesh of destructive emotions created by the very adults who are supposed to protect them. Amanda Robson shows the same level of skill at bringing them to life as she does with her dysfunctional grown-ups.

Her previous novels have been set against a background of apparently ordinary middle-class life, and Envy is no exception. All her main characters get to put their own side of the story across; some are slightly unbalanced to start with, others are pushed to the edge by events. And the supporting players get the same care and attention as the central ones, especially Mimi, the ageing punk rocker who runs a modelling agency, and Mouse, who is somewhere on the higher-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, though it's never spelled out.

Faye and Phillip have a straightforward happy marriage; they live in suburbia with their two small daughters, Phillip is something high-powered in marketing, and Faye, a former beauty queen, is trying to forge a career as a model. On the edge of their apparently perfect life are Jonah, Phillip's handsome and sophisticated best friend, and Erica, unattractive and low in self-esteem, who covets Faye's life and finds ways to track her every move.

And that's how the nightmare downward spiral begins: with covetousness. Not only does Erica want Faye's life; Jonah wants Faye and is prepared to go to any lengths to steal her from Phillip.

In this kind of domestic noir, the characters come first, second and just about every place in the line. Amanda Robson's distinctive first-person, alternating-viewpoint, jump-cutting style is faultless; the reader is never in doubt whose slice of story is being told, even when one picks up where the last stopped. The result is four classic unreliable narrators who create a maelstrom of corrosive cross-currents. It's clear from the start that it's all going to end in tears; and inevitably, because this is thriller fiction, there's blood as well. But it doesn't work out quite as you'd expect...

That jump-cutting is put to adept use as a way of creating tension as well as bringing those characters to life. Some chapters are only a few lines long, and the temptation to read just one more (then just another one, and another, and so on) kept me reading late into the night.

'Unputdownable' says a splash on the cover. It's spot on.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

After graduating, Amanda Robson worked in medical research at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, and at the Poison’s Unit at Guy’s hospital where she became a co-author of a book on cyanide poisoning.  This set her in good stead for writing her debut novel, Obsession, a dark and twisted tale about love affairs gone wrong. Amanda attended the Faber Academy writing course in 2011, and now writes from home full time. She lives in London and Wales, with her lawyer husband.

http://amandarobson.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 Secrets You Hide’ by Kate Helm

Published by Zaffre,
7 February 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-78576-474-5 (PB)

In most English (and Welsh) courts photography of those taking part in trials and related proceedings, whether criminal or civil, is not permitted. The gap can be filled by courtroom artists who sketch some of those involved in the proceedings, not actually from life which also is not permitted, but from memory and from notes made during the trial. Georgia Sage, the protagonist in this first crime novel by the author of a number of women’s novels (see the interview with Kate in the November 2018 Mystery People blog), is such an artist and, like the good artist that she is, she sees more of the psychological truth about her subjects than any photographer, particularly the evil aspects of a subject’s character. We first meet Georgia during the trial of a footballer for rape where she depicts the smug self-satisfaction of the defendant. And Georgia is going to get a really big break – a publisher is going to publish a book featuring courtroom artists with articles about trials which were particularly significant to them with full-colour illustrations by the particular artist concerned. This time, however, the publisher wants Georgia to concentrate on a case at the start of her career in which a young man had been convicted of the murder of his own mother in a fire which he had started. It was only the action of the young man’s stepfather, Jim Fielding, that saved his wife’s two children by her previous marriage. Fielding was hailed as a hero and it is that aspect which Georgia’s publisher wants her to depict. Certainly, Georgia believed at the time that her ability to portray the evil that lived behind the defendant’s youthful, apparently innocent features contributed to his conviction.

But Georgia is not too keen on the project although it will undoubtedly enhance her reputation. It is much too near her own past and certain highly distressing memories. Her name is not Georgia but Suzanne, and the facts of the trial are too like the dreadful events of her own childhood in which her own father murdered her mother and her young brother Pip but for some reason let her live. He is now in prison but the excoriating effect on Georgia has marked her personality. And now, as she travels down to the Forest of Dean to interview Fielding, not only does she begin to wonder whether he really was the hero he had been taken for. And there is another even more unnerving factor: she seems to be being followed by a young boy who seems to be Pip. But how can he be? Is Georgia suffering from hallucinations?

All this makes for an exceedingly complex yet compelling narrative through which the reader must find her way before the truth behind the fire in which Jim Fielding’s wife died emerges and a satisfying ending is achieved. Recommended.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Kate Helm is a successful writer of women’s fiction under her real name Kate Harrison. She has written for national newspapers and magazines including the Telegraph, Mail on Sunday, Red and Cosmopolitan. Kate also teaches creative writing and TV development in the UK and abroad, when time allows. Her first crime novel, The Secrets You Hide, written as Kate Helm, has just been published as an e-book and will be available in paperback in February 2019.

http://kate-helm.com/

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.