The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths by Harry Bingham

I've met Fiona Griffiths before, so I already know she's a bit peculiar, that she has Cotards syndrome which means she has a tendency to worry she's not really alive, and struggles to feel the emotions expected in a given situation. This makes her an interesting detective, to say the least. In this book she's a young DC working out of Cardiff when a body is discovered with links to a small case of payroll fraud.      
   The weirdness of the death doesn't immediately seem connected to a wider criminal network, but that is just what it will turn out to be with millions, if not billions of pounds at stake. When another death occurs on the south coast of England, a brutal slaying that screams murder by execution, two police forces join ranks and isn't it just fortunate that Fiona has just done a course in undercover policing.
    National undercover training is the toughest police course on offer and most who attempt it fail. Not our Fiona though and her weird mental condition is probably helpful here; she can always step outside herself, and not being good at connecting with her feelings is for once a good thing.
    The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths is in part a testimony to the life of the under-cover police officer, making it much more than your standard crime novel. Although there's plenty to keep you on your toes, the story is more measured than your usual whodunnit. Fiona has to develop her legend: in this case she is to be Fiona Grey from Manchester, where she's escaped an abusive relationship, is living in a hostel while working as a cleaner. Her caseworker has ambitions for Fiona though, encouraging her to apply for and gain a position as a payroll officer. She finds work at Western Vale.
    We get to know all about this alter-ego, see her find a flat and to come home to find one Vic Henderson in her only armchair. And suddenly Fiona is part of the gang, falsifying payroll data to create bogus accounts which don't particularly seem to be all that lucrative. We can only guess that this is a small part of a much bigger swindle. Henderson is not the boss, but he is in charge of 'security' and becomes Fiona's intermediary with the big boys. They don't exactly hit it off, he's menacing for all his attempts at charm, but there is a whiff of chemistry.
    Fiona Grey is easily bullied, and there's a touch of Stockholm Syndrome in the way she gets on with Henderson. Meanwhile Fiona Griffiths is trying to remember what it is like to be with her boyfriend Buzz, the best thing that has ever happened to her. As the months go on, Fiona struggles to remember who she really is and there is a wonderful tension in the way she has to rally herself to be the police officer she needs to be to wind up the case and see justice served.
    The novel builds up to a tense and exciting showdown where all of Fiona's policing instincts return as well as that mental toughness of hers that can take over when she needs it. It's a great story brilliantly told in that immediate first person, present tense that works so well with a character like this. This really is one of the more promising crime series around and I'll be catching up with Fiona again for sure.
 

Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer

Just when you start to think there can be no new way to write a crime story, Belinda Bauer pulls out the proverbial rug and thrills the reader with this highly original page turner. If anyone could do this I suppose it would have to be Bauer who has an amazing way of getting into the heads of her characters and what interesting characters they are.
    First off there is Patrick Fort from a tiny hamlet near Brecon, Wales. He lives with a mother who doesn't like him because he's Aspergers, with a fascination for dead animals, and because her husband was killed in a hit and run when collecting Patrick from school after an 'incident'. Patrick has trouble with his temper, though most of the time he's clear-headed and unfailingly logical, making casual chit-chat difficult. Bauer paints a claustrophobic picture of the two living together in misery. Thank heavens Patrick has his bike and is happy to cycle for hours across the gorgeous Welsh countryside giving the two of them a breather.
    Then there's the coma patient at the hospital who is slowly becoming aware of his situation and provides an interesting commentary of what it is like being a coma patient and the oddities of the behaviour of nursing staff and visitors. When he sees a doctor murder a patient in the next bed, he makes more of an effort to communicate what he has seen but it's hard work and the tension rises up a notch or two.
    The disability quota at a university in Cardiff allows Patrick to take an anatomy class. He and several med students spend the lesson time slowly taking apart a cadaver in order to determine cause of death. While the other groups of students find cancer and mortal injuries, Patrick's group has trouble with theirs - the heart doesn't look too bad and the brain yields no tumours - until Patrick, who is looking like winning the top student award, finds a clue. And it looks like murder.
    The race to uncover the facts before the body is released to the relatives for burial drives the plot along, as do Patrick's antics. There are some crazy scenes at Patrick's student flat which add light relief. You need the light relief, as the anatomy class scenes can be grisly and the coma ward scenes are harrowing in their own way too.
    Things become worse when no one will take Patrick seriously and he keeps getting into trouble. Fortunately he finds a sympathetic ear in Meg, his fellow student, who patently likes him even though Patrick is unable to say if she is pretty or not. He just can't tell. The story hums along with a final showdown with the perpetrator, as you might expect, and a happy reconciliation or two towards the end with plenty of surprises.
    What a brilliant crime novel this is - not too long,  you'll read it in a day, and every word counts, which is as it should be. Deeply satisfying.

The Detective's Daughter by Lesley Thomson

This is the first in a promising series by Lesley Thomson featuring Stella Darnell, a solitary forty-something who runs a cleaning company called Clean Slate. Her father, Terry Darnell, a career policeman, had always wanted her to join the force, but a messy divorce and Stella's resentment that he'd always put his job before his daughter meant that she preferred to do her own thing. She likes things tidy, obsessively so, and being her own boss; Clean Slate is perfect, until Stella's father dies.
    Cleaning out her dad's house, Stella comes across a file that fascinates her: the case Terry was working on when suddenly struck down by a heart attack. Even though he was retired, Terry couldn't forget the murder of Kate Rokesmith, strangled in broad daylight while walking with her four-year-old son near the river at Hammersmith Bridge. Her husband Hugh carried the stigma of suspicion for the rest of his life, while little Jonathan was sent to a boarding school to be brought up by strangers.
    So begins Stella's slow determination to complete the case on Terry's behalf. Although, as the story begins, she is battling toothache and being apparently stalked by her ex-boyfriend, Paul, who is as sinister as he is persistent. And then weirdo, Jack, turns up asking for work. She wouldn't have taken him on except, being winter, half her staff seem to be ill and new customers, including her dentist, are demanding her services.
    Jack is a meticulous cleaner but turns out to be strange in more ways than one. He has an uncanny ability to enter people's houses and take up residence without their least suspicion. He has a thing about trains and he carries a battered London A-Z which has him on a weird project only he can explain. And then there's his connection to the Rokesmith case.
    Thomson creates lots of atmosphere, starting with the houses of her father and then the late Mrs Ramsay, the batty old woman customer who dies in strange circumstances; it's amazing how creepy the houses of the dead can be. Stella is always looking over her shoulder, fearing Simon it seems. Add to the list of eerie settings the path under Hammersmith Bridge, and even Stella's own antiseptic and oddly silent apartment building.
    I read this as an ebook which strangely had no page numbering, only a daunting table of contents listing 71 chapters. It says a lot for Thomson's ability to maintain suspense that I kept reading. This is in part due to the likability or at least the quirky individuality of the characters, particularly Jack and Stella, who team up to make an original crime-fighting duo.
    There's Stella's connection to her father as well which tugs at the heartstrings, both wishing they'd had more time for each other. This is certainly an incentive for Stella to carry on with her detective work, which is good news for the reader as there are a further three in the series so far.




   

The House at Sea's End by Elly Griffiths

This is the third novel featuring Elly Griffith's forensic anthropologist, Ruth Galloway, which recalls events that took place on the north coast of Norfolk during the Second World War. Ruth's archaeology pals, Ted and Trace are part of a team who discover six bodies buried at the foot of a cliff and it is soon Ruth's job to date the bodies. She discovers the deaths go back to the 1940s, that the bodies are German and each has died from a single bullet wound to the head, rather like an execution.
    The tides have been eroding this coast for years, mercilessly threatening the house that sits on top of the cliff, Sea's End House. Without the sea, the dark secrets from this corner of the war might never have been uncovered. Somehow Ruth is on the spot when Inspector Harry Nelson interviews the house's owner, former MP, Jack Hastings. His elderly mother, Irene, now in her nineties, talks about her husband, Captain Buster Hastings, who led the local Home Guard at a time when a German invasion was feared at any moment.
    Irene mentions the names of some of the younger Home Guard members who might be still alive and able to shed some light on what happened, and Nelson is soon amassing clues that are startlingly cryptic. When more deaths occur, it would seem that someone is out there who still wants to suppress the truth of what happened.
    Meanwhile Ruth is coming to terms with being a working mother. Just back from maternity leave, she has a daughter Kate to think of as she darts off to examine more sites of interest and help Harry piece together the clues only someone with a mind like hers could figure out, or someone who likes Countdown on the telly. She has unfinished business with Nelson, which adds to the emotional drama of the story, making it a bit more than your standard whodunit.
    And we have our favourite characters popping up again: Ruth's oddball Druid friend, Cathbad, Nelson's subordinates, Judy Johnson, a reluctant bride in this story, and the insensitive Sergeant Clough now oddly romantically entangled with Ruth's archeologist friend, Trace with the purple hair.
    Then there's the weather. The action really gears up a notch during an unseasonable snowstorm and there's a frantic scene by the sea involving explosions as the perpetrator closes in on Ruth - she really needs to lose a bit of weight and get fitter, as these battles for survival seem to be a regular feature of the books. It all adds up to an entertaining page-turner, with enough to keep the brain occupied and plenty of surprises. I'll be keen to check on Ruth again soon, as she's such good company.

The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

I just had to see what happens to forensic archaeologist, Dr Ruth Galloway, in the second book in Elly Griffith's series of mysteries set in Norfolk. By the end of The Crossing Places, Ruth has discovered she is pregnant at 39, and happy about it, though not so keen to reveal her secret to the father, a married man, or her born-again Christian parents.
    At the start of the first book, Ruth was leading a quiet, spinsterish life, absorbed in her work at the university, attending the odd faculty party, but happy at home with her cats and Radio 4. She lives in a desolate spot on the marshes, away from the hurly burly, which suits her fine. Until she meets DCI Harry Nelson who needs her expertise with bones. Since then she's had her life threatened on more than one occasion, as she gets closer to discovering the truth, and her circle of friends has at least doubled in number. There's a lot more of that here in The Janus Stone.
    When builders discover bones at a building site, Ruth excavates the tiny skeleton of a child, minus its head. The large house, which was once an orphanage, is being demolished to make way for apartments, and the burial of the bones at a doorway, implies a kind of ritual sacrifice with links to Roman deities, in particular, Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, often shown with two faces.
    However Ruth notices that layers of soil indicate a much more recent burial and Nelson questions Father Hennessey, who ran a children's home on the site around fifty years ago. He reluctantly reveals that two children ran away from the home in the early seventies, a boy of twelve and his younger sister.
    The reader is treated to plenty of archaeological information about Janus and Hecate, some of the not-so-nice minor Roman deities thanks to Ruth's friendship with Dr Max Grey, from Sussex, who is involved in a dig uncovering a Roman villa. His insight is useful because of the clues at the crime scene which indicate a murderer with a weird obsession with some of the nastier Roman rituals, such as sacrificing children to place under doorways for good luck.
    Max Grey and Ruth have a lot in common and he is obviously in line for some romantic interest; he's attracted to Ruth, that is soon clear. But how will she tell him about her baby? And is Max hiding a secret of his own? Everyone's got secrets it would seem.
    The Janus Stone is another engrossing mystery, with plenty of factual material to get your teeth into while building up to an action-packed ending. Ruth and DCI Nelson are brilliant characters, each good at their job, but with the personality quirks that make the reader care for them. There are another six Galloway-Nelson novels so far, and this will no doubt become my go-to collection for a relaxing escapist read.
 
 

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

The Crossing Places is the first book that features forensic archaeologist, Ruth Galloway, in Elly Griffiths' series of murder mysteries set in Norfolk. Ruth works at the local university and has a particular interest in the henge circle that was discovered near her isolated home right on the marshes. This is a landscape where sea and land meet and according to the religion of the ancient people who built the henge it is also the path between life and death. A perfect spot for burial rites and human sacrifice then.
    When a child's bones are discovered on the marshes, Inspector Harry Nelson requests Ruth's help to date them. It is obviously not a new death, and Nelson hopes to solve a ten-year-old murder, that of Lucy Downey, a little girl taken from her bed in middle of the night. It is the case that haunts Nelson the most, possibly because of the letters that the murderer has sent him over the years, full of references to literature, archaeology and the Bible.
    The bones turn out to be around two thousand years old, and at the burial site are Iron Age artefacts, which is great for Ruth and her archaeologist friends, including her old teacher and mentor, the Norwegian Erik Anderssen. There will be more for Ruth and co to get their teeth into, more finds including an ancient pathway, giving plenty of scope for Griffiths to describe the customs and beliefs of the early people who lived here.
    Ruth sees her job as something akin to detective work, but when another little girl goes missing from her home and more letters arrive with references to ancient burials and the marshes, she is soon involved in a modern day crime. Inspector Nelson with his brusque north of England manner and Ruth with the confidence that comes from her academic expertise are an incongruous pair. Rather overweight and dressed for practicalities as opposed to style, Ruth is the world away from the kind of woman Nelson is used to, but the two make a connection.
    The reader suspects this will be the first of many crimes they will solve together and it is fortunate the two soon develop a grudging respect for each other. Plot-wise there aren't so many surprises but I enjoyed this fairly light and easy read, and I like the main characters, Ruth with her cats and solitariness and Nelson with his bad-tempered impatience but undoubtable integrity.
    Best of all is the setting: what is it about the Norfolk marshes that is so appealing? Possibly it is the danger of the rushing tide that threatens to swallow up anyone caught off the narrow paths of safety. There are shades of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone here, which just adds to the chilling atmosphere and creates a reliably escapist novel.

The Drowning Lesson by Jane Shemilt

I had my doubts about this book in the opening pages as I couldn't quite warm to the main character and narrator. Emma Jordan is an obstetrician and mother of two young girls, Alice and Zoe. Husband, Adam, is also a doctor and their relationship is strained by the urge Emma feels to constantly compete with Adam career-wise. There is no doubt she is very good at what she does and there is little wonder she is driven when the story flips back to show glimpses of her relationship with her father. The drowning lesson of the title gives you a clue.
    Emma is one of those brilliant doctors who works with machine like accuracy but has something missing when it comes to relating to people: not remembering the name of the woman whose baby she has just delivered or noticing that Alice is suffering stress. When Adam plans a sabbatical year in Botswana, Emma is reluctant to take the time away from work to join him, but her falling unexpectedly pregnant and a problem with Alice at school help to change her mind.
   This back story is woven in with the terrible event at the start of the book when Emma arrives at their Botswana house to find her baby boy, Sam, has been abducted. A window has been smashed so it looks like strangers have taken the child who has a distinctive strawberry birthmark on his cheek.
    While the police are soon on the spot, there are hardly any leads and Emma's mind ranges over a variety of suspects: the nanny Teko, who turned up out of the blue and whom the girls took an instant liking to; Simon, the girls' tutor who has suddenly left the area; Adam's secretary, Megan, who had been overwhelmingly kind in arranging things from London, doesn't escape scrutiny either. Meanwhile the police question the elderly gardener and Alice becomes even more withdrawn and blames her mother for everything.
    The novel takes every woman's worst nightmare as the basis for a tense and gripping read. And while I found Emma a difficult character at first, that changed as the book progressed because she is really interesting. Adam and girls are also well rounded, coping or not coping in various ways.  The eventual solution to the mystery is only half the book as Emma learning that there is more to life than winning is a core part of the story. This could have been all rather obvious and clumsy, but Shemilt avoids these pitfalls - perhaps due to the spare, straightforward narration that suits Emma's developing character so well.
    While this might not have been my first choice of reading matter, once I'd picked it up it was hard to put down and I rattled through the final chapters. It would be a terrific TV drama series over several Sunday nights, too.

The Information Officer by Mark Mills

You could easily pass off The Information Officer as just another pacy World War Two thriller. It has all the standard requirements. First off we have a young, intelligent investigator in the form of Max Chadwick. Max's step-mother has supposedly got him a cushy number for the duration, handling press releases for the military on the isle of Malta. It's propaganda really, aimed at maintaining morale and good relations with the islanders. As it happens it hasn't turned out to be such a safe billet with Malta the target of an ongoing bombing campaign by the enemy, which only adds to the suspense.
    Next there's an evil malefactor at large - in this case a rapist/murderer is stalking sherry queens, the women who work in the bars in an area known as the Gut. His previous killings have looked like accidents, with nothing to suggest a connection between them. But the most recent girl has bled to death from a wound that could have been caused by ack-ack shrapnel, or was it made to look that way?
    Max's doctor friend, Freddie, is alarmed when the latest victim is found with vestiges of a submarine officer's uniform clutched in her hand, and calls in Max to investigate. With relations between the British forces and the Islanders fragile at best, Max will have to move swiftly to find the killer before the details leak out and cause even more resentment.
    And of course it wouldn't be your classic thriller without a love interest for the hero. Max has a couple of options here. First off there's Mitzi, stuck in a loveless marriage with Lionel, an officer in the submarine corps. Mitzi works tirelessly for a service sorting the affects of dead RAF personnel, packaging them up for their families and writing heartfelt letters to accompany them.
    Then there's Lilian, half Maltese and half English, who is as smart as she is beautiful. Her job as deputy editor of a local newspaper brings her in contact with Max and the two are good friends.
    Max zips around the island on his motorbike and his easy manner means he has many acquaintances, some of whom are suspects. Lionel is a possibility if only because he wears the right kind of uniform and taking him out of the equation would free up Mitzi for Max, or is this too obvious a plot twist? Questions also hover over Elliott, an American pilot, temporarily grounded after an accident.
    Meanwhile the reader is treated to snippets of the perpetrator's own story through his eyes which are chilling and fortunately brief. It is all fairly classic stuff except Mills is a better than average writer. He captures the snappy dialogue of servicemen desperately keeping chipper while the Germans give them more than they can possibly return. The characters and camaraderie are all vividly brought to life, while the plot builds up to a terrific showdown as history is made in the air above.
    But what I really enjoyed was the picture Mills creates of Malta - an island with a long tradition of being under siege. With its distinctive architecture, amazing harbours and sunny Mediterranean ambiance - it is as much of a character in the book as Max.

Redemption by Jussi Adler Olsen

Adler-Olsen is one of those crime writers who juxtaposes scenes showing his killer - in the case of Redemption he's an evil kidnapper/child killer - with scenes from the point of view of his detective. It's another novel featuring Department Q, a cold-case team led by curmudgeonly DI Carl Morck. This changing-viewpoint narrative makes things uncomfortable for the reader from the outset, and knowing what to expect, I was somewhat reluctant to pick this book up.
    I guess I am still a bit nostalgic for those old crime novels where the reader and the investigator work side by side, discovering clues and working out whodunit together. But really, Ader-Olsen makes the storyline steam along with these narrative shifts because, while Morck thinks he's dealing with a cold case, it is only the reader who seems to know that our killer is still at work and unless the police get a move on, another youngster is likely to die within a number of days.
    What really hooks you in at the outset, however, is the message in a bottle scenario that the author has cooked up. Our killer would have carried on unnoticed if it hadn't been for young Poul, who tied up in a boat shed, believes he and his brother will be murdered. As the elder of the two, he feels he should do something, so he finds paper, an old bit of newspaper, and making a pen out of a splinter of wood and ink from his own blood - all with his hands tied together - he writes a detailed description of his kidnapper and their situation.
    The bottle eventually turns up in Scotland, where it adorns the window sill of a remote police station for a couple of years until it piques the curiosity of a visiting computer expert. When it winds up in Department Q, Morck already has a lot on his hands with a visiting Health and Safety inspector in the pipeline and his basement bolthole out of bounds due to an asbestos scare. There's also a number of cases his team have been struggling with and he doesn't need another.
    Thank goodness Morck's quirky underlings, Rose and Assad, have other ideas. And it's also lucky that a few clues are thrown up by the message,  even though many of the words have become illegible. The team manage to track down the newspaper and that gives them an area to hone in on. It transpires that the boys were part of a large family from a religious community who have long since left the area.
    While the Q team track the family down, our mysterious kidnapper has his sights on another family who belong to The Mother Church and the tension winds up a notch. In the background are grim scenes showing our killer's childhood, his possessiveness towards his own wife and child. There are some humorous scenes from Morck's own private life - the wife who wants to return, his 'thing' for Mona the psychologist and Morck's recurring guilt.
    There's a ton of action too: car chases, stake outs and a particularly tense scene in a bowling alley. And all the while the clock is ticking. It's a gripping story that barrels along, which is a good thing, because sometimes reading a translation like this throws up a few curly phrases you don't want to linger over. That's a small niggle, for overall Jussi Adler-Olsen has created another superb crime-thriller, a surprisingly quick read for a book over 600 pages long. I certainly hope there's a few more Department Q novels in the pipeline as sometimes a good Scandinavian mystery is just the ticket.

The Pierced Heart by Lynn Shepherd

It must have been difficult being a private inquiry agent in Victorian England, if Lynn Shepherd's protagonist, Charles Maddox is anything to go by. Benighted could be one way to describe him and this is obvious from page one, when Charles is travelling by train to a remote part of Austria, a journey that must be completed by a lengthy ride in a coach.
    The weather is miserable and so is he, having two months before lost his occasional lover/servant and the child he hadn't realised she was carrying to an ectopic pregnancy. He is full of guilt and remorse but things get worse when he arrives at the imposing ancestral home of Baron Von Reisenberg, a pale, thin, chilling man who shuns the light and has strangely long teeth.
    Aha, we are in vampire territory, says the reader. And yes the term 'exsanguination' does crop up throughout this book, but knowing Shepherd, you can be sure she will find a plausible explanation for anything too fanciful, that is both ingenious and likely to keep the reader guessing until the final page.
    But back to Austria. Charles has been sent on behalf of the Bodleian Library to discreetly examine the suitability of a bequest that his Austrian host would like to offer this venerable establishment. While he's there he witnesses many strange occurrences, and by night hears some peculiar sounds, and being the determined investigator that he is, decides to explore. This upsets his host no end, and Charles finds himself mowed down by Von Reisenberg 's guard dog before things really take a turn for the worse.
     By the time Charles gets back to England he's even more unsettled, while London is full of people gathered to see the Great Exhibition at the purpose-built Crystal Palace. This makes his usual dashing about even more difficult with the streets unusually congested. And dash about he must as Sam, his policeman friend, has called on his help over a series of grisly murders involving prostitutes. Could there be any connection to Von Reisenberg who has mysteriously arrived in England?
    Charles's investigation is mixed in with the diaries of Lucy, the daughter of a kind of illusionist cum showman who wants to develop Lucy's talent as a medium in order to improve their fortunes. Her health and treatment by an Austrian doctor with alarming results ups the tension of the novel. Charles's discoveries and Lucy's experiences are set to dovetail as the plot hurtles to an exciting end.
     Shepherd writes wonderfully with her vivid present-tense style that keeps things fairly pacy, while her distant third-person narration adds a suitably Victorian tone. It amazes me how she can make this work, but some how it does and adds to the reader's enjoyment hugely. The use of Lucy's diary (both first person and past tense) throws in a nice contrast so you never tire of either.
    I adore these books - they're probably my favourite mystery series at the moment - and I particularly love how Shepherd draws on research and her depth of knowledge of literature and history from the period. It all adds up to a particularly rich as well as entertaining reading experience.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I don't often read this kind of thriller - there is so much tension that you know you're not in for a relaxing sort of reading experience. On top of that, The Girl on the Train has all these characters who aren't very likeable.
    First off there's Rachel, our main narrator. After a failed marriage she's in a bad way having lost her job because she's an alcoholic and she doesn't have the wherewithal to do anything to fix her life. She keeps up a charade to her flatmate Cathy of a normal working woman taking the train to work each day, but the reader knows this would be impossible on the amount of wine and ready-mixed gin and tonics she consumes.
    To make matters worse she can't seem to let go of her husband and continues to phone and leave him messages, even hanging around outside her old house. Naturally this upsets his second wife, Anna, who wants to be left alone with her husband and baby.
    Then there's the fantasy world Rachel dreams up about the couple she calls Jess and Jason, who she can see from her commuter train when it stops at a signal. Jess and Jason epitomise the kind of loving relationship she would like to reinvent with her ex-hubby, Tom, made more real to Rachel by their proximity just along the road from her old house, the house Tom now shares with Anna.
    But one day Rachel sees something from her train that shocks her and soon after, Jess, whose real name is Megan, disappears. Rachel becomes a bit like an amateur sleuth - she has time on her hands after all - and contacts Megan's husband, not Jason but Scott, and does even more cringe-worthy hanging around and snooping, fuelled by all the alcohol she gets through.
    Further down the list of unlikeable characters we come to Megan, who narrates part of the story in the months before her disappearance, and we learn that Megan is at least as flaky as Rachel. Other chapters are narrated by Anna, who can be smug and unsympathetic.
    However what makes these women unreliable also makes the plot hum along. With Rachel there are her blanks in memory, the humiliation of people's disgust over events she cannot recall. As she puts the story together of Megan's disappearance, she begins to wonder if she had a hand in it herself. And why does she experience so much lurking fear?
    The police of course are no help at all. They want Rachel to keep her nose out of things, but they don't seem to be getting anywhere and don't believe anything she tells them. She's a pathetic fantasist and a drunk, so you can't blame them.
    I can see the appeal of a book like The Girl on the Train as it reels you in from the opening chapters and is superbly engrossing. It gives you a grim view of marriage, of the kind of stifling suburban misery that goes on in behind closed doors and the cruelty that lurks in what seem to be the happiest of relationships. But there's too much happening for the reader to dwell much on any of that and you just have to get to the end to see what happens.
 

The Facts of Life and Death by Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer writes a stonkingly good murder/suspense story, and The Facts of Life and Death is no exception. Written partly from the point of view of ten-year-old Ruby Trick, it describes the activities of a serial killer in coastal Devon. Young women are abducted, often at night, told to strip and then to phone their mothers, who have to listen to their daughters' final moments of distress. It is a cruel and chilling M.O.
    While this is all going on, Ruby has problems of her own. Her parents live in a run-down cottage in the small hamlet of Lymeburn on the coast. The walls are damp and the cottage is in a woeful state of disrepair. John Trick has been unemployed for two years - while Ruby's mother, Alison works long hours as a chef for a restaurant in a nearby town.
    We learn that the two are from very different families - John from a broken home, while Alison was the very beautiful daughter of middle class parents. Ruby seems to have been the reason for their early marriage, but now cracks are appearing in their relationship and they scarcely have a kind word for each other.
    Meanwhile tubby Ruby hangs out with a small group of Lymeburn kids - among whom she has a bit of a crush on Adam - dreaming of owning a pony and eating cookies and chocolate at every opportunity.
    Bauer has a particular gift with characters, which come to the page vividly believable and full of the quirks that make them interesting. I particularly enjoyed DC Calvin Bridge, the young copper, who has become a detective to avoid the hassle of keeping his uniform neatly ironed.
    Calvin's life gets very complicated when he is flung in at the deep end partnering the attractive DCI King on a difficult murder case. He makes some shocking gaffes in her presence while at home he foolishly agrees to marry his girlfriend so that she won't interrupt the sport he's watching on TV with floods of tears. He manages to redeem himself by spotting one or two clues, but the body count continues to rise.
    Belinda Bauer has created another atmospheric south of England setting with the wind, rain and sea all adding to the tension of a town under siege. It is the site of a once profitable ship building industry - the source of John Trick's redundancy - plus there is the small town snobbery and the meanness of children at school. Ruby gets her fair share of this, but fortunately has a kindly teacher.
    It all adds up to a story that reels you in, while the tension of a killer who begins to take more and more risks makes the story hum along. The inevitable is put in motion and the book finishes on a high point with all the key players plus the weather on a collision course that you can't tear yourself away from. I am glad that Bauer doesn't pump out her fiction as I was completely exhausted by the end and will need time to recover before I tackle another on her list.
   

The Last Train to Scarborough by Andrew Martin

At the start of this novel, railway detective Jim Stringer wakes up in the dark to find himself lying on a pile of coal, unable to remember how he got there. He soon finds out he's on board a ship, the kind of jobbing steamship that runs from the north of England to the south. On top of that he's not too well, suffering terrible nausea, and the captain of the ship and his foreign sounding first mate seem set to kill him.
    Change of chapter and suddenly the reader is with Jim and his family - 'the Missus' and his children, Harry and Sylvia (named after Sylvia Pankhurst, of course), at their new house on the edge of Thorpe on Ouse. It's a bigger house but the rent is reasonable, perhaps because the landlord has taken a bit of shine to Lydia, Jim's wife.
   Lydia wants the family to get on in the world, and with that in mind, Jim is about to ditch railway policing for clerking in a law office, with the view to one day becoming a solicitor. He'll be James Stringer from now on, thank you.
    But the Chief has one more case lined up for him, and this concerns the disappearance of a railway fireman (they're the ones that shovel in the coal to keep the engine running), who was spending a night at the Paradise Hotel in Scarborough. The case is months old, and the local police have been all over the guesthouse numerous times, but no one can account for the whereabouts of Raymond Blackburn, a strong, handsome, silent type with a fiancee waiting for him.
    The Chief sends Jim off undercover as a fireman to the Chief's rifle-club pal, Tommy Nugent, a chatty, nervous driver with guns in his luggage, just in case. The Paradise advertises itself as economical accommodation for railwaymen, and Jim finds himself in Blackburn's old room at the top of the stairs.
    The off-season hotel offers a bunch of suspects: a beautiful but flirtatious landlady and her 'slow' but powerfully built brother who has a fascination for newspaper articles about railway accidents. The other two guests are equally peculiar: Howard Fielding, a finely dressed older gent with a taste for fine wine and cigars who is oddly enough in the railway postcard business with fellow guest, Theo Vaughan. Theo is nowhere as flash and is hoping to branch out into a more racy and potentially more lucrative line of postcards as he soon reveals to Jim in an amusing scene at a local pub.
    As usual there is a load of scope for humorous banter among the inmates with their oddly contrasting characteristics and Jim's need for information. These scenes are interwoven with ones on board the coal steamer that has become Jim's prison. Here there is no comfort and Jim's health more and more precarious. The reader can only wonder how he is going to get himself out of this one.
    The Last Train to Scarborough is another terrific story in the Jim Stringer series. There's still plenty of railway detail to keep the train buffs amused, but if you don't know a thing about it all, the story still rattles along with loads of pace and that wonderful north of England style. With this instalment we are in March of 1914, and only too aware that Jim will be a long way from home in the next book in the series, The Somme Stations. It's bound to be a corker!

This Night's Foul Work

Fred Vargas comes up with some decidedly nasty criminals in her Commissaire Adamsberg novels, yet they are always immensely good fun. Perhaps this is because of the character of Adamsberg himself who has a dreamy, irrational way of probing crime.
   This Night's Foul Work begins as Adamsberg is settling into his new house, building a wall in a haphazard kind of way, watched by his one-armed Spanish neighbour, Lucio. The Spaniard is convinced Adamsberg's house is haunted by a murderous nun, who Lucio is convinced will kill again.
    Back at the offices for the Serious Crime Squad, the Commissaire is conniving to prevent a double homicide from the wrong side of town going over to the Drug Squad. He engages the help of attractive pathologist, Ariane Lagarde, a woman he has upset in the past. But the two must bury the hatchet because the usual police pathologist is out of sorts, suffering from 'a touch of the vapours'. Ariane helps Adamsberg along with his case when she declares their murderer is a woman.
    This book also sees the addition to the squad of Lieutenant Veyranc, a moody looking chap from the same part of the Pyrenees as Adamsberg, who thinks he has a score to settle with his new boss. The Commissaire has set him the task of guarding his girlfriend Camille from a psychopath who featured in the previous book. Veyranc spends his days in a cupboard on Camille's landing, waiting in vain for his boss to agree to meet him, but oddly content. The other peculiar thing about Veyranc is his tendency to break into clunky Alexandrine verse.
    But why should we be surprised as each of Adamsberg's team has his or her own quirks of character: Commandant Danglard, extremely erudite and beautifully dressed, is morose and descends into frequent drinking bouts at work; Mercedet suffers from narcolepsy and has a mattress in the coffee room; Retancourt is a shy but Amazonian woman, who inspires devotion from Estalere who can remember everyone's blood type, coffee preferences and birthdays. All these things will come in handy later on.
    While accompanying Camille to a Normandy town where she is playing in a concert, Adamsberg encounters the locals at his hotel bar - quaintly rustic characters who are upset about the brutal slaying of a stag in the woods, shot and hacked at for the removal of its heart. It's an odd story which Adamsberg agrees to look into, little knowing that it will somehow have a bearing on his double homicide.
     There will be many more complications before he manages to solve the case, including the escape of an elderly psycho-killer nurse from prison, the apparent accidental deaths of two virgins in their thirties and the theft of a church's relics of St Jerome. There will be some amazingly diverting scenes, including one where the Serious Crime Squad, equipped with cars, motorcycles and a police helicopter, follow The Snowball - the squad's resident cat - across Paris in order to prevent the murder of one of their own.
    With such a hugely entertaining, absorbing kind of read, it would be easy to think of this as one mad-cap scene after another. You could also be forgiven for thinking that every French person must be slightly batty. But the novel has its own kind of logic, as well as red herrings and a plot that builds to one heck of a surprise at the end. Vargas seems to do the impossible: she obeys the rules of crime novel writing while contriving to be completely original. Surely, this makes her one of the best in the business.

Self's Murder by Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink's novel Self's Murder is one of those rather good detective novels that lift the genre well beyond simple, page-turning escapism. As you might have expected from the author of The Reader, the writing is thoughtful and elegant.
    Gerhard Self is a private investigator in Mannheim, on the brink of retirement, when he stops to help a motorist and his driver caught in a snow drift.  The grateful passenger turns out to be a Mr Welker, owner of a small, select sort of bank with a long tradition and the subject of a recent tragedy. This is because Welker's beloved wife has recently disappeared while the two were on an alpine walking holiday.
    The police have been stumped as to whether she fell into a crevasse or was pushed, or even kidnapped and murdered. These are the obvious questions you'd expect Self to be exploring, but no, instead he is sent to discover the identity of a silent partner, who just after the Napoleonic Wars invested a fortune in the bank and saved it from ruin.
    Self's investigations take him to visit the bank's archivist, Schuler, an elderly and malodorous hermit whose cottage is crammed with memorabilia. He's a bit put out that Welker has chosen to employ a detective to look into the bank's history when surely it is Schuler himself who would be the best person for the job.
    A number of things turn the case on its head, and Self begins to wonder if he shouldn't really be investigating the disappearance of Welker's wife and soon begins to distrust Welker's brutish looking chauffeur and general factotum, Gregor Samarin. Next thing, Self's personal life begins to get interesting when Karl-Heinz Ulrich turns up on his doorstep, claiming to be an ex-Stasi officer who scoffs at Self's poor security and the fact he seems to have been unaware that Ulrich has been tailing him. On top of all that Ulrich announces he's Self's son.
    We are in the decade just after the fall of the Berlin Wall after all, and there is some interesting east meets west (Germany, that is) stuff going on. Ulrich has made some surprising deductions about Self's case, and both are beginning to wonder if the long lost partner story is just a pretence for something else.
    The case begins to hot up and Self calls in a few mates to help out, including his policeman chum, Nagelsbach, recently retired and a stickler for rules, and his surgeon buddy, Philipp who is happy to put his hospital and a number of drugs at Self's disposal. The team enact a convoluted plan that is dangerous but wildly entertaining as well, and there are a few plot twists before Self discovers who the real criminals are.
    All this is told in the dryly charming style of Self's first person narration. There's quite a philosophical feel to it all, and the story, while entertaining enough in itself, is made all the better for the inclusion of a cast of distinctive characters. Self offers the reader some excellent company - such a shame there are only three in the series and that this is the last. I shall be eager to hunt out the previous two, for sure.

The Corners of the Globe by Robbert Goddard

I could develop quite a taste for spy novels, having just finished the second in Robert Goddard's trilogy featuring James 'Max' Maxted, a returned POW and ex-Royal Flying Corps fighter pilot. We first met Max in The Ways of the World, when he rushes to Paris to uncover the facts behind his father's death. A member of a team of delegates sent to help broker a stable settlement after World War One, Sir Henry was pushed off a building, a death made to look like suicide. Sir Henry was obviously aware of secret and damaging information and had to be silenced.
    Everything seems to come back to one man - Fritz Lemmer, onetime spymaster for the Kaiser, and now apparently determined to turn events in favour of Germany and its allies. By the end of the first book, the only way Max can discover what's going on is to enlist as an agent with Lemmer's network, secretly aided by Horace Appleby, a top man in the British Secret Service.
    The Corners of the Globe starts out in the Orkney Isles, where Max is sent by Lemmer to retrieve a document held by a German battleship commander. If you know about this area of history, after the war, the German fleet of battleships was interned here at Scapa Flow.
     Max soon realises the importance of the document he has been sent to get, particularly when people around him begin to die. A cryptically encoded list of Lemmer's agents seems too good to hand over so Max decides to make a run for it and return the document to Appleby, if he can just get to London. There are some hair-raising scenes involving jumping on and off trains and dodging Lemmer's henchmen.
    Meanwhile back in Paris, Sam Twentyman, Max's old flight mechanic, is carrying on with his work maintaining the ambassadorial motor fleet, when a meeting with Sir Henry's Japanese policeman friend, Commissioner Kuroda, causes Sam grave concern. Kuroda warns him that Friz Lemmer believes certain documents are in possession of le Singe, an Algerian thief and seller of secrets. Sam's acquaintance with le Singe in the previous book surely puts him in danger.
    And then of all people, Max's Uncle George gets caught up in the action, when some ancient artefacts sold by Sir Henry to raise money in a hurry turn out to be fakes and the buyer wants his money back. George agrees to go to Paris to hunt out the dealer, Soutine, who wouldn't you know is a close pal of le Singe's. Could he be dealing in secrets too?
    There are some very embarrassing secrets worth protecting, and quite a few eager to use them to advantage, among whom are our three American friends, Travis Ireton, the mysterious trader in useful information, his able colleague Schools Morahan and their savvy secretary Malory.
    I  found the Malory/Morahan/Sam team a particularly engaging set of characters, caught up in some intense skullduggery at the hands of the Japanese contingent. Everything seems to go back to Sir Henry's time in Japan; even Lemmer was on the scene there. While Max is legging it around Britain, Sam and the Americans are holding the fort in Paris, discovering what le Singe has been hiding.
    Max is really put through the mill, as Lemmer's agents come out of the woodwork at every turn. If he is somewhat too much the perfect upper-class hero, he is easily forgiven for being a little two-dimensional when you see what Goddard throws at him in a sequence of thrilling action scenes, leading eventually to Marseilles. By the end, Max is up against the wall as we reach one of those agonising last pages that finishes with those dreaded words 'to be continued'. Although it might seem impossible, the reader can be sure things will turn out just fine for Max, but unfortunately, we will have to wait until some time next year to find out how.

The Reckoning by Rennie Airth

The Reckoning is the fourth crime novel featuring John Madden, a retired policeman from Scotland Yard, happily ensconced in the country. It is 1947, and the National Health Scheme is imminent, a royal wedding is in the wings and England seems to be looking forward to a new post-war era, in spite of ongoing rationing.
    An execution style murder on the banks of a Sussex river has the local police stumped. The killer, a youngish man in a red sweater was spotted by a farmer so you'd expect he'd be easy to catch, and yet he seems to have vanished. His victim, retired deputy bank manager Oswald Gibson, was a quiet, inoffensive chap who enjoyed fishing and belonged a local music society. Who could possibly want to kill him?
    Scotland Yard is called in and Madden's former colleague, Billy Sykes, is just as perplexed although there are a couple of useful clues: the murder is oddly similar to the death of a Scottish doctor and so may be the work of the same killer.  The second clue is even more astonishing. It seems, Gibson was writing a letter, which he never posted, addressed to John Madden. He'd had something he wanted to discuss with the ex-detective, but Madden has no recollection of having met the man.
    The death of Tom Singleton in Oxford, with a similar shot to the neck, indicates a serial killer is at large, while the similarity of the victims' ages suggest that all of them may have served in the First World War, like Madden. He decides there must be a connection in their past and what that link is must be found quickly or very soon there are likely to be more deaths.
    Madden pops into London to help an elderly aunt with some renovations - also an excuse to check in with his old colleagues who are running the case. Airth has produced some terrific characters here - along with ex-army Sykes, there's DCS Chubb, a plain-spoken but endearing bulldog of a man, and stout hearted Lily Poole, recently plucked from uniform and with buckets of nous. But it's 1947 and an uphill battle to be taken seriously as a female detective.
   The Reckoning had me completely riveted - so fortunate to have a wet Sunday as I couldn't put the book down. Not only has Airth concocted a satisfying mystery, but there's a good supply of action and plot-twists to keep the reader hooked. What's more the writing is superb and there is plenty of thought given to the ongoing trauma created by the first war to end all wars, but this never bogs the story down.
    You can quite happily read The Reckoning as a stand alone novel, but it is a pleasure to know that there are several more books featuring John Madden and his smartly intuitive detective work.

The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard

There's nothing like a map at the beginning of a book, snuck in between the title page and Chapter One to whet your curiosity. And what could be better than a map of central Paris complete with the Isle de la Cite, Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower? Robert Goddard's novel The Ways of the World has exactly that being set in the city of light, during the spring of 1919, when Paris hosted many of the world's diplomats and heads of state in order to discuss the fate of the nations caught up in WW1 and set the tone of the new peace. Or something like that.
    When one James 'Max' Maxted - formerly of the Royal Flying Corps - discovers that his father has died suddenly in suspicious circumstances, he and his brother, Ashley, journey to Paris to bring the body home. Sir Henry, a minor diplomat, had fallen from the top of a building in Montmartre, upstairs from the apartment where he would visit his mistress, Corinne Dombreux. They'd met in Russia prior to the revolution, and Sir Henry, stationed in St Petersburg, had been a shoulder to cry on when Corinne's late husband had been unmasked as a traitor.
    Ashley, heir to the Maxted fortune, is happy to hush the incident up as an unfortunate accident and return their father for a quick and discreet burial. But James is determined to discover what really happened - he suspects foul play - and stays in Paris to avenge his father's death.
   It seems Sir Henry had contacts with a Russian organisation hoping to overturn the Bolsheviks and was in touch with an American seller of secrets, Travis Ireton. Also on the scene is Lionel Brigham, another diplomat who happens to be the lover of Max's mother. There are loads of suspects plus a cryptic document that would indicate Sir Henry was trying to raise some money. A quick search of his hotel room reveals a small key - the kind that is used for a safety deposit box - but what has happened to his diary? Max is up against the French police and the British Secret Service who don't want to cause any diplomatic upset that could stall the peace talks.
   Fortunately for us Max is determined, smart and fairly fit, in spite of his time as a POW - he'll need to be, particularly when up against Fritz Lemmer, former spymaster to the Kaiser, and Tarn, a particularly ruthless assassin who can kill and vanish into the night. It's also good news that Max has his old flight mechanic mate, Sam Twentyman, on hand to help out when things get tight.
   The two make a great team - Max, a man of action, has a privileged background, so he knows how to talk to the diplomatic lot. Sam comes from a family of bakers - he hopes he and Max will realise their dream of starting a flying school so he doesn't have to join the family shop - and he's a lot more down to earth and good fun, though smart too.
   But The Ways of the World is really too busy delivering a ripping yarn to worry much about its characters, which are interesting enough, but not particularly complex. It is a story loaded with atmosphere both of the post WWI period and the setting of Paris during a not very warm spring. It also gives quite a good picture of the sort of diplomatic wheelings and dealings, the favours and bargaining that underpinned the Treaty of Versailles. A quick and diverting read, this is the first in a trilogy, which is good news and better still, the second book, The Corners of the Globe, has been recently released.
 

Mercy by Jussie Adler-Olsen

What is it about maverick Scandinavian detectives that we like so much? Eager to read beyond Nesbo and Mankell, I took a punt on Danish author, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and read the first in his Department Q series.  Mercy introduces us to his taciturn, difficult detective, Carl Morck. Of course we expect him to be taciturn and difficult (aren't they all?), but this guy is verging on antisocial, and who can blame him?
    Morck has just come back from extended leave, after a shooting which left him wounded, one fellow officer dead and another paralysed for life. He is bitter and burdened by guilt when he turns up at work, where he discovers he is to be in charge of Department Q. The government wants some high profile cold cases solved, and are happy to throw money at a police force which is critically under resourced, while Morck's boss is happy to siphon off a chunk of the funding to other departments.
    Morck's new office is in the basement and his only staff will be a kind of janitor dogsbody, a Syrian refugee named Assad. This is fortunate, as Assad is everything his boss isn't: willing, cheerful and polite. Assad is also smart, methodical and has contacts who know about forged documents. Somehow this comes in handy later on. Clearly he's a character full of mysterious potential that will slowly unfold as the series progresses.
    The two make up one of those oddball couples which detective fiction is peppered with, going back to Holmes and Watson. And it works really well, giving a potentially harrowing story a bit of light relief.
    By chance, one of the first cases that interests them is the disappearance of prominent young politician and party hopeful, Merete Lynggaard, assumed drowned. This is just as well, as all the while we have been getting to know Morck and his new set-up, Adler-Olsen has been feeding us scenes from Merete's imprisonment. For five years Merete has been locked in an underground bunker, which her captors leave in darkness, unless they feel like turning the lights on 24/7. You can imagine what that does for Merete's body-clock.
    Her captivity is lacking in basic sanitation, she's on minimal rations, and there is periodically an increase in the air pressure. Meanwhile she is left to try and figure out why she is being punished in this way. The reader is soon aware of two possibilities. In her political career Merete seems to have annoyed quite a few people and stirred up some potential jealousy. Or does the reason go back to her teens, when she was involved in a terrible car crash which destroyed two families? Her private life has been secretive, revolving around caring for her younger brother, whose mind was destroyed by the accident - a situation she tells no one.
    Whatever the reason, Merete's time is running out, and what seems to be a cold case has a sudden urgency which Morck and Assad take time to discover. There's nothing like a dose of dramatic irony to ramp up the tension in a story and it certainly delivers the goods in Mercy. The plot surges towards a dramatic showdown that makes the shooting described at the beginning of the book seem like a minor scuffle.
    Mercy is a brilliant opening to a very promising series, with enough page-turning action and nail-biting suspense to keep you interested, nicely balanced with interesting characterisation and wry humour. It is as well that the story tends to sweep you along, because I found some of the writing a little clunky - probably due to the translation into English - something I've never experienced reading Mankell. It won't stop me picking up the next books in the series though.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Andy Weir sure puts the 'science' into science fiction with his first book, The Martian. Hooking you in from the page one, the Martian of the title is quickly revealed as astronaut Mark Watney, who six days into a mission to Mars with five other astronauts, finds himself abandoned by his crew-mates and believed dead.
    While the rest of the team escape what could have been a disastrous storm, Watney wakes up and begins the difficult task of saving himself in the short-term and making plans for his long-term survival. Another Mars mission is scheduled in four years' time and he's determined to be ready for it.
    It is lucky that Mark is a trained botanist and that NASA thought that the crew would like some real potatoes to enjoy for Thanksgiving. Using a mixture of Mars dust, faecal matter and lots of water - he figures out a way to produce this in abundance - plus the potatoes, Mark builds a mini market garden inside the Hab, the dome that was to house him and his colleagues for a month.
    The science gets a lot more complicated than that as he figures out how to contact NASA to let them know he is alive - though a smart young scientist had spotted activity already when watching some satellite images. He also has to figure out how to get himself several hundred kilometres from the Hab to the site of the next mission using an exploration vehicle which has been designed for short trips only. There are lots of technical details which I did my best to keep up with, and for someone who doesn't really know a lot about chemistry and physics (I could kind of keep up with the botany), it made for oddly exhilarating reading.
    But Weir doesn't just throw a lot of science at the reader. He knows about how to keep the plot boiling along as Watney encounters numerous setbacks and NASA breaks rules and argues about what to do and somehow his old crew-mates come on board the story as well. And you can imagine how they must be feeling.
    Though the star of the show is really Mark. He is a terrific character: funny as well as clever, determined and vigorous. There are plenty of comic touches, including the seventies music and old tv series that Captain Lewis thought to bring along and which Mark resorts to for the sake of something to break the tedium of his aloneness.
    The overall effect of The Martian is a tribute to human inventiveness and the will of people all over the world to help out someone in trouble. It is also a bit like watching a cross between Kerbil Space Programme and Mythbusters. Not many writers could pull off a book like this and make it work. And it's not surprising that Ridley Scott has plans to turn the novel into a movie starring Matt Damon. I can't wait!