Deep Water - Christine Poulson

A cure for obesity is the Holy Grail of medical research. Two years after a drug trial that went horribly wrong when a participant died, Calliope Biotech is close to success in the quest for a drug that will cure obesity. When another company claims to have got there first, & takes their claim to court, patent lawyer Daniel Marchmont is employed by Calliope's entrepreneurial director, Lyle Linstrum, to scrutinize the evidence of lab books & trials when the lawyer working on the case, Jennifer Blunt, is killed in a car accident. Daniel's reservations about taking on the enormous workload of the case are complicated by the fact that Jennifer was his ex-wife, who had left him for his best friend. Now happily married to Rachel, they have a daughter, Chloe, who suffers from Diamond-Blackfan anaemia. Rachel is concerned that taking on Jennifer's case in such circumstances will revive painful memories but she's unprepared for the stress that events from the past will place on her marriage. When Daniel discovers that a vital lab book, detailing the experiments undertaken by Honor Masterman & her team, is missing, & questions are raised about Jennifer's professional competence, the car accident begins to look more sinister. When Daniel finds the missing lab book hidden in Jennifer's house, the mystery only deepens as he tries to discover why Jennifer hid the book & what impact its contents will have on the case.

Chloe's condition needs constant treatment - blood transfusions, injections - & the only hope for a cure is either a bone marrow transplant (neither Daniel or Rachel is a match) or the research that consultant paediatrician Paul O'Sullivan & his team are working on. Grant money is fast running out & researcher Katie Flanagan is under pressure to come up with publishable results that will hopefully lead to a cure for Diamond-Blackfan anaemia. Rachel is involved with the charity sponsoring the research &, after meeting her, Katie is very aware of the lives that depend on her work. That's why she's frustrated when her experiments don't seem to be producing the expected results. Katie is also aware of how important this research is for her own career. She can't stagnate at her current level forever. She needs to move on from postdoctoral research in a lab to a lectureship or permanent university post. After the sudden death of her supervisor, she was lucky to be offered a bench in Honor Masterman's lab to be able to complete her research before the grant money ran out.

Professor Honor Masterman has been touted as a future Nobel Laureate & her team, led by Will Orville, are depending on the successful outcome of the patent case; their reputations depend on it. Katie is grateful for a working space but soon becomes aware that there's something wrong at the lab. Working late at night she's aware that there's someone else there, someone who isn't written in the log book. There are also odd accidents - chemicals misplaced, the spread of radioactive contamination. There's also the puzzling non-results of Katie's experiments. A gas explosion that leaves a security guard & lab technician Ian Gladwill in hospital leaves Katie wondering if someone could be deliberately sabotaging the lab. Katie's friendship with Rachel leads to her renting the Marchmont's barge when her flat's lease runs out. She becomes involved in Daniel's case when she's able to help him interpret the crucial lab book & begins investigating, putting herself in considerable danger as reputations & a lot of money are at stake.

Deep Water is a terrific thriller. I enjoyed it as much as Christine Poulson's last novel, Invisible. I really enjoy the way that she combines a tense plot with the very personal stories of her protagonists. Daniel & Rachel's desperate search for a cure for Chloe that leads Rachel to join the board of the charity raising money for research is underpinned by the details of Chloe's ongoing treatment. Their life revolves around Chloe's needs but they're a happy couple until Jennifer's ghost brings back Daniel's memories of their marriage & heightens Rachel's insecurities about her place as Daniel's second wife - was she only second-best? Daniel's reservations about taking on Jennifer's case are complicated not just by personal feelings but the need for his company to keep Lyle Linstrum happy. He can have no idea of the complications that the case will bring to him personally as well as professionally.

I also loved all the detail about scientific research & the constant need to publish, chase grants & funding, the temptation to heighten or even falsify results is ever-present. The atmosphere of the lab, with its strict security & focused researchers, was great but I always love the sense of place that Christine Poulson evokes. The Cambridgeshire Fens, Ely Cathedral & especially the lonely stretch of water where the barge is moored, were so evocative. As a cat lover I also have to mention Orlando, the ginger cat who has several significant scenes in the narrative. Katie Flanagan is a very sympathetic character & I'm pleased that Deep Water is the first in a series featuring Katie. The moral & ethical dilemmas in the story are incredibly knotty & all the characters have to grapple with the human cost of their actions. I always read Christine's books in a great rush & this was no exception.

Lion Fiction kindly sent me a review copy of Deep Water. You can read more about Christine's work at her website here & there are interviews with Christine on Sue Hepworth's blog & at Clothes in Books.

Cold Earth - Ann Cleeves

During Magnus Tait's funeral a landslide sweeps down the hill &, along with headstones & grave markers, destroys a nearby croft. Inspector Jimmy Perez is attending the funeral & decides to take a look at the seemingly abandoned croft. He's surprised to find a woman's body among the debris & even more surprised to discover that the forensic evidence points to murder rather than accidental death. The croft, Tain, had belonged to Minnie Laurenson &, after her death, her American niece had inherited the property. Apart from the occasional holiday let, the croft was empty & the identity of the woman proves hard to track down. The only clue is a letter addressed to Alis & a belt that may be the murder weapon. Local landowners Jane & Kevin Hay were Minnie's closest neighbours but polytunnels & trees obscure their view. Perez calls in Chief Inspector Willow Reeves from Inverness to lead the investigation & the team's first priority is to discover the identity of the victim.

Jimmy & Willow have worked together before & their friendship is tinged with a tentative attraction that both of them recognise but are unwilling to explore. Jimmy is still grieving for his fiancée, Fran, & he's caring for Fran's daughter, Cassie. He returned to Shetland some years before & knows the benefits & disadvantages of a tight-knit community when it comes to a murder investigation. The first clues to the victim's identity point to a happy, attractive woman buying champagne for a special Valentine's Day dinner but then another witness, Simon Agnew, comes forward & describes a visit from the same woman to his counselling drop-in service where she had been distraught & despairing. When the team discovers that the woman was using a false identity & that she had ties to Shetland going back some years, they need to find out who could have stayed in contact with her & what brought her back to the island. A second murder close to the scene of the first complicates the investigation & leads to suspicion & mistrust as the victim's private life is exposed.

The Shetland series is one of my favourites (links to my previous reviews are here). Originally a quartet of novels - Raven Black, White Nights, Red Bones, Blue Lightning - but the success of the quartet led to more Shetland novels - Dead Water, Thin Air & now Cold Earth. The Shetland setting is one of the strengths of the books. A remote, relatively closed community (although less so since the expansion of the oil & gas companies) is a classic setting for mystery novels & Ann Cleeves makes the most of the connections between families that result from living in such close proximity. Jimmy Perez is an enigmatic man who has had enough time away from Shetland to be mistrusted by some but it's also given him perspective which is valuable in his work. In a way Jimmy is the typical loner detective, self-contained & melancholy, but he's a more well-rounded character than the stereotype implies. Sergeant Sandy Wilson, who has lived on Shetland all his life, lacks confidence & looks to Jimmy for reassurance. His familiarity with the people & the place is both an asset & a burden but Jimmy has learnt how to work with Sandy to bring out the best in him.

All the characters are interesting & memorable, no matter how small a part they play in the story, like the observant young cashier at the supermarket who grabs any excuse for a cigarette & a coffee break to talk to Sandy to Rogerson's business partner, Paul Taylor, with his frazzled wife & three small sons. Jane Hay is a recovering alcoholic who is starting to feel restless in her gratitude to her husband for supporting her & worried about her son, Andy, who has dropped out of university & is back home, silent & uncommunicative. Jane's husband, Kevin, works hard but is unsettled by something or someone. Local councilor, solicitor Tom Rogerson seems successful but some of his decisions on the Council have upset locals & his family - wife Mavis & daughter Kathryn, the local schoolteacher - seem unaware of the rumours about his womanising.

I read Cold Earth so fast that, as usual, I had no idea about the identity of the murderer, even as Jimmy & Willow were racing towards the solution. I love a police procedural where all the steps of the investigation are laid out. There are flashes of intuition but most of the work is a hard slog, often frustrating but with enough clues to keep the detectives hoping & the readers reading along at a breakneck pace. I'm assuming that there will be a final novel in this second quartet with Fire in the title & I can't wait!

Listening to novellas

Jane Fairchild & Paul Sherringham are lying in bed after making love. Paul is the son of a well to do family & the lovers are taking advantage of an empty house. His parents have gone to Henley to have lunch with his future in-laws, the Hobdays & their neighbours, the Nivens. It's March 1924. Mothering Sunday, the day when servants are given a holiday to visit their mothers. The Sherringham's house is empty & Paul has taken the opportunity to arrange this meeting with Jane. Jane has the day off because she's the Niven's housemaid. Jane & Paul have been secret lovers for several years & in two weeks, he will be marrying Emma Hobday. This is the last time they will see each other.

That's all I want to say about the plot of this stunning book. The events of Jane's whole life are woven through the story of this one day. We learn that Jane is an orphan & left the orphanage with enough education to be able to read (more than just to recognise the word Brasso on a tin) & write, which was unusual in a servant at that time. She's been in service since she was about 15 & is now 22. Her employer allows her to borrow books from his library, most of which seem never to have been read. She will go on to leave service, work in a bookshop in Oxford, live in London & become a writer. All this is conveyed in the third person although we are seeing everything from Jane's point of view. The narrative moves from present to past to future effortlessly. Devastating facts are dropped into a casual sentence, so casually that I had to stop listening & wonder if I'd really heard that.

Graham Swift creates a whole world in just 130pp, 3 1/4 hours of listening. The Great War permeates everything about this story. The two houses, in their country estates, have each lost two sons in the War. The young men stare out at Jane from photographs; their rooms are left untouched. The only well-read books in Mr Niven's library are on a small revolving bookcase next to his chair; even that detail evokes his grief, that he keeps his sons' favourite book near him. Boys adventure stories - Henty, Rider Haggard, Stevenson - that Jane reads avidly. There are a few books, dated 1915 that still look new & unread, among them a book by Joseph Conrad that shows Jane what a writer can do. So much in this world is unsaid. Each house has only two indoor servants, a cook & a housemaid. The bicycles that Jane & the cook ride on their afternoons out must have belonged to the dead boys but this is never mentioned. They're called Bicycle One & Bicycle Two.

The sense of grief is there but also of looking to the future as the Sherringhams look forward to Paul's marriage & his plans to study law. What the characters know or fear is hinted but never spelt out. The transgressive nature of Jane & Paul's relationship across social classes is evident but there's also a sense of time moving on & those conventions changing as everything changed after the war. Paul leaves his discarded clothes on the floor & the bed unmade while Jane thinks about the housemaid's work. Paul is handsome, confident, entitled. We don't know what he's thinking or feeling about this last meeting with Jane although by the end of the book, we can speculate. After he rushes away to meet Emma for lunch, Jane slowly walks naked through the empty house, eating the pie left out by the cook for a snack, in possession for a short time, before dressing & riding her bike the long way, back to her everyday life.

Mothering Sunday is such a beautiful book. It has an elegiac quality that reminded me of J L Carr's A Month in the Country, one of my favourite books. The characters & scenes in this novel will stay with me for a long time.

Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means is also about the aftermath of war but has a very different tone. I heard a discussion of the book on BBC4's A Good Read. I'd read the book years ago but discovered the audio in our catalogue was read by Juliet Stevenson so couldn't resist revisiting it.

In London in 1945, a group of young women are living in the May of Teck Club (named after Queen Mary who was born Princess May of Teck), a women's hostel. The war in Europe has just finished, the war in the Pacific is coming to an end but there's still rationing, there are bomb sites everywhere - there may even be an unexploded bomb in the garden of the Club if one of the older residents is to be believed. Food & clothes are vital topics of conversation,. A group of girls living on the third floor share a Schiaperelli dress which has consequently been seen all over London. The dress belongs to Selina, cool & beautiful, with several men keen to escort her around. Joanna, the daughter of a country clergyman, unlucky in her love for her father's curate, gives elocution lessons. Jane Wright works for an unsuccessful & unscrupulous publisher & spends her spare time writing begging letters to famous writers under the instructions of Rudi. Even if the writers don't send money, an autographed letter from Hemingway is worth something. She is overweight so can't fit into the Schiaperelli dress but feels she should have extra rations as she's doing important "brain work" that requires extra calories.

While the girls wait for lovers or brothers to come back from the war, they continue in their jobs, enjoy what social life they can find, scheme to get up on the roof of the Club through the lavatory window to sunbathe, complain about the wallpaper in the drawing room. The three older members of the Club, spinsters who have been exempted from the rule that members should be under 30, provide a history of the Club & take pride in continuing quarrels about religion & proper Club protocol for as long as possible. One young man, Nicholas Farringdon, becomes involved with Selina. He's a poet who has written an indigestible manuscript full of anarchist sentiments that Jane's boss wants to publish if he'll change it. The feeling of being in limbo at the end of the war ends with a tragic event that scatters the residents of the Club & has an impact into the future for several of the residents.

I loved the satire of the publisher, George Johnson, always with an eye to the main chance, exploiting Jane's willingness to work & her adoration of authors. The war has had an impact on all their lives & now it's as if they're just waiting for the war to finally end for their real lives to begin. Muriel Spark looks with a very beady eye at the girls of the title. The Girls of Slender Means was written in 1963, so not that long after the end of the war. Muriel Spark's sharpness of tone & observation has none of the elegiac quality of Graham Swift's writing in Mothering Sunday. I wonder if it's just the passage of time that influences the way writers think of a period. Of course, Swift never knew England in the 1920s as Spark must have known it in the 1940s & of course, they're very different kinds of writers.

Juliet Stevenson's narration is excellent as always, she's one of my favourite readers. Maybe it was because she also recorded the audio book of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, but I was reminded of Pym as I listened. After listening to & reading some very long books lately, these two novellas were just what I was in the mood to listen to.

I've never considered listening to audiobooks as somehow cheating or as not real reading. I see them as a way to read even more while I'm cooking, ironing, driving or walking. Apparently some people do but New York Magazine is on my side.

One Under - Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

I seem to be regaining my interest in detective fiction. I used to read a lot of series but I seem to have cut back to only a few favourites. It would be easier to keep up if I could stop myself becoming interested in new subjects. Ancient history is my latest interest. I read Mary Beard's wonderful account of Roman history, SPQR, earlier this year & I've become fascinated by a period I know very little about. However, I've just finished watching Series 9 of Lewis & that reminded me that I hadn't read the latest book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' Bill Slider series.

Two deaths, seemingly unconnected. Jim Atherton is called to a death at an Underground station, known as a "one under". It seems to be an uncomplicated suicide. CCTV shows the man jumping in front of the train. There's no one near him, he wasn't pushed, he didn't trip. George Peloponnos was in his late forties, living with his elderly mother, & working for the North Kensington Regeneration Trust. There seemed to be no reason for him to kill himself. On the same day, DI Bill Slider & the rest of his team are at the funeral of another suicide, their colleague, Colin Hollis. The atmosphere of misery at the funeral suits Slider's mood, the guilt he feels at not being able to help Hollis & also the unresolved feelings he has about the loss of the baby his wife, Joanna, was carrying. The baby would have been due around this time.

Slider goes to the scene of another death, on the patch of another station, because the dead girl, Kaylee Adams, lived on a housing estate in Shepherds Bush. Kaylee was found in a ditch by the side of a country road, apparently the victim of a hit & run driver. However, forensic pathologist Freddie Cameron isn't happy with her injuries & doesn't think she was hit by a car. Then there's the absence of Kaylee's bag & phone & why were her knickers on inside out & her shoes found some distance away? Kaylee lived with her younger sister & her mother, who was more concerned with her boyfriends & her next drink than caring for her daughters. When Slider discovers that Kaylee had known another girl, Tyler Vance, who was found drowned, he is determined to find out what happened to her & prevent her death becoming just another statistic.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' Bill Slider series are terrific police procedurals. I love the way the reader follows the investigation step by step & makes the discoveries along with the investigating team. This is a long running series (no 19, Old Bones, is published early next year) & Slider's team have become old friends. The painstaking investigation, with flashes of intuition & the odd hunch, draws me in & never lets go. The first death, the suicide of George Peloponnos, seems to be straightforward, but, as a seasoned reader of police procedurals, I knew there had to be a connection. When it was revealed, it was shocking but also incredibly sad. Slider is a decent man, caught between the dictates of his conscience & the struggle to justify a seemingly hopeless investigation when the powers that be control the funding. Even when he is explicitly warned off the investigation, he keeps plugging away, finding other ways to pursue the threads of the story, determined not to give up.

The other aspect of the series that I love is the humour & wit. The chapter headings are often puns & Slider's boss, Porson, can't open his mouth without uttering a malapropism. Slider's personal life is as important as his work. His musician wife, Joanna, still recovering emotionally from the miscarriage but back at work & enjoying it. His father, living next door with his second wife & a willing babysitter for young George, his namesake. There was less emphasis on the personal in this book but I think Harrod-Eagles strikes the right balance. There's even a further instalment of Atherton's fraught love life as he tries to keep up the playboy facade after the departure of Emily, his most serious girlfriend. I read One Under in a weekend & I'm looking forward to the next book in the series. Now that I'm back on the mystery bandwagon, I wonder what will be next?

Sandlands - Rosy Thornton

It can be difficult to write about short stories. It's not easy to discuss plot without giving too much information. In this case, however, it's easier because Rosy Thornton's impressive new volume of stories, Sandlands, share many common elements. Place is the most obvious as all the stories are set in the Suffolk fenlands & often share the same locations - the Ship Inn, Willett's Farm, a WWII airfield now turned into a museum, the village of Blaxhall. There are also common themes - nature, remembrance, the past reaching into the present. I enjoyed the literary echoes too, of Dorothy L Sayers' The Nine Tailors in Ringing Night, a story featuring bell ringers & of Edward Thomas's poem As the Team's Head Brass in Stone the Crows, where a WWII Spitfire pilot looks back on his war service from his nursing home to a scene that became as familiar during WWII as it had been thirty years before.

Nothing in that evening landscape moved to give it life and substance - until suddenly, beyond my left wingtip, a miniature figure swung into view, straddling the midline of a field where it changed from the dull grey-brown of stubble, to a deeper richer russet, ridged in black. At first I had no sense that the figure was in motion, so slowly did it creep along the line of the last furrow, edging forward no faster than a sluggish beetle, dazed by the sun. I took another turn, dropping my height a little, to gaze down until I could make out the broad backs of a pair of chestnut horses, the glinting Y-shape of the plough and, behind it, just visible, the dot of a man's head.

Sometimes the literary inspiration is more overt as in A Curiosity of Warnings, when a man follows in the footsteps of the protagonist of one of M R James' ghost stories with unintended consequences. Other stories with supernatural touches include The Witch Bottle, where Kathy's new home holds the memory of a long-ago tragedy that threatens the present; The White Doe, where Fran experiences the mythical or mystical visitations of the doe while coming to terms with the death of her mother & The Watcher of Souls, where a barn owl's nest hides a cache of love letters from long ago.

One of my favourite stories was Whispers. Dr Theodore Whybrow has been working on the definitive biography of Regency poet Wiliam Colstone for years. He's almost paralysed by the pressure that comes with writing a book so long-awaited. On impulse, he buys a Martello tower on the coast, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars that he knew as a boy, & as he spends more time there, he feels the closeness of the past & the inspiration that he needs.

It had been a calm night outside, overcast and starless, the sea as close to a millpond as he had known it. But the tower was never silent. Even on the most breathlessly still of nights, there were whisperings in the bricks. He sometimes wondered if it was really the sea - some subterranean echo or vibration, rippling up through the walls from the shingle on which they stood. Or perhaps an illusion, a trick of the mind, like the echo of the waves heard in a seashell. Yet, for all that, there was a paradoxical realness and solidity about the voices here, an immediacy - yes, that was the word for it: immediate, unmediated - which recalled with a sudden sharp pang the early days of his scholarship, that quickening of the blood he had thought to have lost. A connection thought severed, rejoined.

Many of the stories are about the links between generations, of the same family or of the people who have lived in a house or a place. In All the Flowers Gone, three generations of women are connected to an airfield. Lilian works at the airfield during WWII & falls in love with a pilot. Her daughter, Rosa, protests against nuclear weapons at the base in the 1980s. Rosa's daughter, Poppy, is a botanist, searching for a rare flower that has been sighted near the old runway. I loved the way that the women were linked not only by blood but by cycling with its connotations of freedom & the way that the place played a significant role in the lives of Lilian, Rosa & Poppy.

It was a perfect morning for cycling. The temperature must have fallen during a clear night and a dawn mist had formed over the fields.As Poppy bowled along Tunstall Lane it rose in layers, which seemed to lift and peel away without losing any of their density, and hung just clear of the barley so that sunlight filtered through underneath, tingeing them from below with watery gold. Once through Tunstall village and out on the road that stretched straight ahead into Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her battered trainers, pushing down harder with each stroke, enjoying the stretch in her calves and the rush of cool air in her lungs, until the dark trees on either side were no more than a blur.

In Nightingale's Return, the son of an Italian POW travels back to the farm where his father worked during the War & we travel back to Salvatore's time at Nightingale Farm while his son makes the journey in the present day.

I loved the humour in many of the stories. I think my favourite story was The Interregnum. The rector of St Peter's Blaxhall goes on maternity leave & her replacement is Ivy Paskall. Ivy is a lay reader studying for the ministry rather than a member of the clergy but secretary of the PCC, Dorothy Brundish, is sure that the parish will manage. That is until Ivy's plans for bonfires at Epiphany & a women's feast at Candlemas, the Christian equivalent of Imbolc, begin to cause some uneasiness. Ivy's explanations seem very reasonable but are her ideas maybe a little pagan for the congregation of St Peter's?  In High House, a woman cleans for Mr Napish, a retired engineer whose obsession with theories about tides & flooding feed into his unusual hobby.

I enjoyed this collection of stories very much. The book is beautifully produced by Sandstone Press & the cover image is incredibly striking, evoking the themes of nature & unease in the stories. I've read all Rosy's novels & reviewed several of them here (see Ninepins, The Tapestry of Love, More than Love Letters). Rosy was the first author to contact me back in 2010 when I started blogging & ask if I would like to review her book which was such a thrill. Luckily I've enjoyed her books so reading them has been a much-anticipated treat.

Rosy Thornton kindly sent me a review copy of Sandlands.

The Betrayal - Helen Dunmore

The Betrayal is the sequel to Helen Dunmore's 2001 novel, The Siege, set during the siege of Leningrad during WWII. The war has been over for seven years. Anna Levina is married to Andrei Aleksayev. Anna works in a nursery school & Andrei is a paediatrician at the local hospital. Anna's younger brother, Kolya, lives with them in Anna's family apartment, the place where they struggled & suffered through the cold, the starvation & the threat of bombing during the siege. Life for Anna & Andrei means being careful, careful not to stand out, careful not to antagonise the neighbours lest they tell the authorities that there are only three people living in a family apartment, never revealing your true thoughts to a colleague or a friend, keeping your voice low even when they are alone in case someone is listening. Every action is scrutinized & there is always someone willing to put a black mark against your personnel record if your commitment isn't considered patriotic enough. The memories of the siege are never far from the surface. Everyone who was in Leningrad during that time cannot forget, either the small acts of kindness or luck that kept you alive another day or the acts of cruelty & selfishness.

She can still feel little Kolya in her arms, in the freezing darkness of the midnight apartment. He is so thin than she can touch each separate bone of his ribcage. His lips move against her neck, sucking in his sleep. She holds him all night, for fear that without her warmth Kolya will die.

 Anna's father was a writer, an intellectual who was persecuted during the purges of the 1930s. He was lucky to survive then but, like hundreds of thousands of others, he died of cold & starvation during the siege. Anna still has some of her father's writings carefully hidden in the piano stool. She hasn't even told Andrei about the papers, afraid that he would want her to destroy them. Anna & Andrei are conscientious workers, doing the best for the children in their care even when silence may be the more sensible course to take. The Levin family's dacha outside Leningrad miraculously survived the German advance at the end of the war & Anna, Andrei & Kolya spend weekends there, repairing the house & cultivating the garden. It's the only place where they can breathe & relax, forgetting the restrictions of their everyday lives.

It's beautiful here. Lots of people wouldn't think it was. But when you've hunted mushrooms in the woods year after year, and you know all the best places; when you've fished every pool and stream and know where the trout hide on the stony bed while water ripples over their backs; when you're covered with scratches from foraging for berries; when you come home dusty, sweaty and triumphant with a load of firewood; when the marshes have sucked at your boots as you've jumped from tuft to tuft; then you love it with all your heart. You want it to live forever. Your own death doesn't seem to matter as much.

Andrei is maneuvered by a colleague into seeing a child with a possible tumour in his leg. Cancer isn't Andrei's area of expertise, he looks after children with arthritis, but he knows why his colleague is reluctant to get involved. Gorya Volkov's father is an important man in State Security, a man who has the power to make you disappear. Even being noticed by such a man carries danger. Andrei is well aware of the danger but agrees to see Gorya. It soon becomes apparent that the tumour is cancerous & Gorya's leg must be amputated. Andrei is aware that there's a chance that the cancer will spread & he's the one that has to tell Volkov the prognosis.

But how has it come about that I'm in this room, with this man? Andrei asks himself, as his clinical eye notes the pallor of Volkov's face, his heavy breathing and the dilation of his pupils. Anna and I were always careful. We believed we'd thought of everything that could happen to us, but we never allowed for this. Is it just chance or is it fate? If it's fate, then this was coming towards me all my life, even when I was happy and completely unaware that there was any such child in the world as Gorya Volkov. I was here in this hospital, and Volkov was wherever such men have their offices.
Anna has always said that the important thing is never to come to their attention.

When the cancer does spread & it's certain that Gorya will die, Andrei receives a phone call in the middle of the night, suspending him from his work at the hospital. He is abandoned by nearly all his friends & colleagues although he does hear that the surgeon, Brodskaya, who operated on Gorya, has also been investigated, even though she had left Leningrad & taken an inferior job as far away as she could go. The inevitability of what follows is still suspenseful as Andrei waits at home for the next phone call or the sound of a car stopping outside the apartment building in the middle of the night. Anna is pregnant & they try to make plans that will keep Anna, Kolya & the baby safe.

He should have let Anna stay home with him. They should be together. Or perhaps that is completely wrong. Perhaps the only way to save her is for them to be quite separate. He should go off somewhere, far away. She should say that she threw him out because she was so ashamed of having  a husband who had to be investigated. Yes, the example of Pavlik Morozov was the one for Anna to follow. Let her denounce him.

Inevitably Andrei is arrested, interrogated & moved from Leningrad to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. The State has decided that doctors are part of a conspiracy to eliminate important Party members, just as in the 1930s scientists were targeted & in the late 1940s, artists & musicians were denounced. He is kept in solitary confinement, apart from one short period when he's put in a communal cell by mistake. The knowledge that he is not alone sustains him through the punishments & the degrading conditions where his only mental resource is to go through his medical training to stay sane & stop him thinking of what might be happening to Anna on the outside. Anna & Kolya leave Leningrad & go to the dacha, not knowing Andrei's fate &, with the help of Golya, a family friend, wait for Anna's baby to be born.

The Betrayal is a beautifully-written, incredibly tense & suspenseful novel. Helen Dunmore is a poet as well as a novelist & her writing is full of striking images, especially in the lyrical scenes at the dacha, where life seems almost normal, as if the war & the terror of State control was far away. I was reminded of a movie I saw many years ago, Burnt by the Sun, the story of a Red Army officer during the purges of the 1930s. The opening scenes at the officer's dacha in the height of summer, before his fall, have the same quality of innocence before unimaginable darkness moves in. Inevitably I also thought of Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzberg, the remarkable memoir I read a few months ago. Dunmore shows how easily innocent people can become guilty, because of a change of policy or just by being conspicuous. Putting your head above the parapet is always dangerous even if, like Andrei, your conscience & sense of duty gives you no choice. Once you're part of the so-called justice system, then the steps are preordained & there is rarely any escape.

I don't think it's necessary to have read The Siege before reading The Betrayal, especially if, like me, you read The Siege back in 2001 when it was published. I had no trouble getting my bearings even though I could remember very little of the plot of the first novel apart from the powerful effect the book had on me. Andrei & Anna remember past events & put their present lives in the context of their past. Their memories sustain them & also act as a warning of the arbitrary nature of life in a totalitarian regime.

The Novel Habits of Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith

Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher. She lives in Edinburgh, she's wealthy (she bought the applied ethics journal she edits when it was under attack from rivals), married to Jamie & the mother of three year old Charlie. All these advantages worry Isabel, even though she is philanthropic, kind & always ready to help anyone in need, especially when their problem has a moral or ethical dimension. Isabel's relationship with her niece, Cat, is another source of worry. Cat is not much younger than Isabel & was once involved with Jamie. This hasn't helped their relationship & Cat, who is a prickly woman, takes offence very easily while also presuming on Isabel's good nature when she needs help. Cat also had terrible taste in men & has just gone off to Paris for a weekend with the latest man, leaving Isabel to help out in her delicatessen at short notice. Isabel's social prejudices are on show when Eddie tells her that Cat's new boyfriend is a dishwasher repairman & is then surprised by his knowledge of art & poetry. She also has to adjust her ideas about a colleague, Professor Robert Lettuce, who has made her professional life very difficult. She discovers that Lettuce is in line for a senior post at the Enlightenment Institute at the University of Edinburgh which disconcerts her. However, after meeting Lettuce's wife, Clementine, & finding out a little more about the man & his motivations, she has to reassess her instinctive dislike of a man she has considered a personal enemy.

When a friend of Isabel's asks her help for a neighbour, Isabel agrees to meet the woman, Kirsten, who's concerned about her son. Seven year old Harry has begun talking about another life, his "other family", & his mother is worried about his mental stability. Kirsten has recently separated from her husband so is Harry's preoccupation with another family just a reaction to the separation or is it really evidence of reincarnation? Isabel agrees to look into it even though she's profoundly sceptical about reincarnation. Harry's memories of the house he lived in are very specific & Isabel decides that a possible location is near a lighthouse on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. What Isabel discovers when she visits the house seems to put Harry's memories down to chance but that isn't the end of the story.

It's taken me a while to get around to reading this latest instalment in the Isabel Dalhousie series. I seem to be reading fewer & fewer modern novels & I've stopped reading several authors for whose new books I was always first in the reservation queue. Although I borrowed this when it was published last year, I took it back unread. A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly decided the time was right & then sat down & read it in one sitting. I like Isabel, the Edinburgh setting, her musings about Scottish art (she visits Guy Peploe's gallery this time & looks at an exhibition of Colourists), the visits of Brother Fox &, this time, the visit to the west coast of Scotland. I'm afraid Isabel's endless worrying & musing drives me a little crazy & I can't help wondering that if she had less money & had more to do, she wouldn't have time to endlessly debate the ethics of her own & everyone else's motives. But then, she is a philosopher & that's what she's like - there, I'm dithering just as much as Isabel! I also find Jamie a bit of a cipher - handsome, kind, endlessly supportive, great cook - but Isabel seems a little less inclined to question their relationship in this book.

I was also interested in the reincarnation theme. I've always been fascinated by reincarnation. As well as reading lots of time-slip novels over the years, I've also read quite a few more serious books on the subject, including the ones by Ian Stevenson that Isabel mentions. It's one of those subjects, like the existence of ghosts, that can never really be proved one way or the other although there are certainly some very convincing stories about both phenomena. As a rational person with a leaning towards scientific explanations of the world, Isabel finds reincarnation hard to believe but she's open minded enough to do some research as she pursues her investigation. The Novel Habits of Happiness was an enjoyable way to spend a cool summer afternoon & with the enticing hook of a new plot development at the end of the novel, I'll look forward to the next book in the series.

The Woman in Blue - Elly Griffiths

Cathbad is house sitting for a friend, Justin, who lives in a house next to St Simeon's in Walsingham. As well as the house, Cathbad is also looking after Justin's cat, a defiant black tom called Chesterton. When Chesterton escapes one night, Cathbad follows him through the churchyard & sees a woman, dressed in white & wearing a blue cloak, standing next to a tombstone. As Walsingham has been a site of pilgrimage for worshippers of the Virgin Mary for centuries, & Cathbad is a druid, unfazed by spiritual experiences of any kind, Cathbad is not afraid but interested. Next morning, though, the body of a young woman, Chloe Jenkins, dressed in a white nightdress & blue dressing gown, is found carefully laid out in a nearby ditch with a rosary on her chest. Cathbad's vision was all too real.

Chloe was a patient at The Sanctuary, a clinic for people with addictions. She was a beautiful, blonde young woman, a model who had become involved with drugs & spent several periods in clinics trying to overcome her problem. DCI Harry Nelson & his team soon discover that security at The Sanctuary wasn't particularly rigorous & Chloe wasn't the only patient who had slipped out that night. Harry is also disconcerted by the resemblance of Chloe to his wife, Michelle, & their daughters. Harry's marriage had been shaky for a while when Michelle discovered that Harry had had a brief affair with archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway & that he was the father of her daughter, Kate. Harry wants to be part of Kate's life & Michelle agrees that he should but her own unhappiness has become more apparent, especially as she has become emotionally involved with Tim Heathfield, one of Harry's team.

Ruth is surprised to be contacted by Hilary Smithson, who she knew when they were both post-graduate archaeology students at Southampton. Hilary's career has changed course & she is now a priest. She's going to be in Walsingham at a course for women priests with ambitions to become bishops. Hilary has been receiving disturbing anonymous letters, addressing her as Jezebel & abusing her & all women priests as unnatural. Ruth convinces Hilary to show the letters to Nelson & soon there appears to be a link with the murder of Chloe Jenkins when one of the women on the course, Paula Moncrieff, is also murdered. Both Chloe & Paula were blonde & attractive, both killed in Walsingham. Could there be more of a connection? Could the same killer be responsible? There seems to be a religious theme - the rosary left on Chloe's body & the fact that Paula was a priest. Nelson & his team find clues in the past & in the connection of both women to Walsingham. The action spans the weeks from early spring, when the snowdrops cover the ground in the ruins of Walsingham Abbey to the performance of the Passion Play on Good Friday when everything becomes clear.

I love this series. The relationship between Ruth & Nelson is just wonderful. Ruth has had several inconclusive relationships since Kate was born but she really seems to be in limbo, unable to forget Nelson, despite the tenuousness of their relationship. Nelson is also torn between Michelle & Ruth, wanting to do the right thing & not hurt anyone but continually wrong footed & mostly making himself miserable. Nelson discovers that Michelle has been seeing Tim in a very dramatic scene that results in a reconciliation of sorts with Michelle. Ruth's life as a working mother isn't easy. Her boss, Phil, is still irritating & she feels inadequate as a mother, although Kate is happy, healthy & has lots of friends. Cathbad & his partner, Judy, now have two children & are very content, although Judy is anxious to get back to work in Nelson's team as soon as her maternity leave is over.

It's so lovely to find out what's been happening with Ruth, Nelson, Cathbad & their families. Nelson's Sergeant, Dave Clough, is as enthusiastic & as clumsy as ever & there's a new member of the team, Tanya Fuller, who tries a bit too hard & gets on Nelson's nerves because she isn't as empathetic as Judy. The suspects are a reliably creepy lot with potential motives all over the place. As in the best mysteries, hardly anyone is quite what they seem & everyone has secrets. The religious & historical themes are also fascinating & there's even an archaeological angle as Ruth investigates the results & the finds from a couple of digs that took place at the abbey in the past, looking for the site of the holy house where pilgrims came to worship a phial containing the Virgin's breast milk.

My only problem with this series is that I read them so fast (less than two days for this one) & then have to wait a year for the next book. I couldn't even wait for my library copies to arrive & bought the eBook on the day it was published. It's the mark of a great mystery if I read it that fast so I'll just have to sit tight & wait for the next instalment.

Star Fall - Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

I love this series. Bill Slider is one of my favourite detectives & this entry (number 17) in the long-running series is as good as any of them.

Rowland Egerton is an expert on Antiques Galore!, a TV program that sounds very similar to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow. The program visits various locations, experts appraise objects brought along by members of the public who are amazed or horrified by the valuations. Egerton is one of the stars of the show; handsome, debonair, charming. One afternoon, Egerton is found dead in his home, stabbed in the throat. His business partner & friend, John Lavender, who discovered the body, is shocked & distraught. Slider & his bagman, Jim Atherton, are quickly on the scene & realise that this is no random burglary gone wrong. There was no sign of forced entry & only two objects, out of the vast array of antiques on display, are missing. A green malachite Fabergé box & a painting by Berthe Morisot. Neither object was fabulously expensive so there must have been a reason why the killer only stole those two pieces.

As Slider's team begins to investigate, Egerton's public persona as the charming expert is dented quite a bit. He'd changed his name, left his wife & daughter & had many affairs. His colleagues also accused him of pinching the most promising objects to feature on the show & of buying the best objects from their flattered, star-struck owners after the show. Egerton & Lavender owned an antiques shop which was mostly bankrolled by Egerton although it was Lavender who had the real knowledge of antiques that propped up Egerton's role as an expert. It soon becomes clear that there were several people with a motive to kill Egerton. Politics, forgery & the television business all have a role to play in solving the murder of Rowland Egerton.

Apart from the puzzle element of this series, I really enjoy catching up with the characters. Bill's wife, Joanna, is a musician & they have a son, George. Joanna suffered a miscarriage at the end of the previous book & they're both still coming to terms with it. Jim Atherton is a ladies man who looked as though he was finally ready to settle down with Emily until his inability to stay faithful doomed the relationship. The rest of the team are just as individual & I enjoy the procedural element of the book. No flashes of brilliant deduction, just dogged police work - interviewing potential witnesses, looking at CCTV footage & asking lots of questions. My favourite character is Slider's boss, Porson. His speech is full of malapropisms. I always like to quote a few of Porson's most beautifully mangled sentences,

Porson went on, "Well, keep me informed. The instant you've got something. And don't go plunging in irregardless, like a bowl in a china shop."
"No, sir."
"I want all your ducks in a row before I go in to bat. This is a whole new kettle of worms you're opening up."
"I know, sir," said Slider. It was never a good sign when Porson's imagery started to fracture.

The atmosphere of this book is a little more downbeat, in tune with Bill's worry about Joanna. The wintry weather is also very much in tune with Bill's melancholy & the depressing dead ends of the investigation. I picked up Star Fall when I was reading several big books & needed a change. It's been a while since I read a contemporary detective novel & I read this in just a few days. Bill & his team are reliably entertaining & I'm looking forward to the next Slider mystery, One Under, which is published in November.

The Ghost Fields - Elly Griffiths

Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is excavating a possible Bronze Age cemetery when she's called to a nearby field to examine the remains of a WWII plane. The pilot's body is still in the cockpit but Ruth soon realises that he hasn't been there since the 1940s.  DNA testing reveals that the pilot was related to local landowners, the Blackstock family. The family knew that Fred Blackstock had been killed in a plane crash during the war but thought he had crashed at sea. His body was never recovered. So, where has Fred's body been for the last 70 years & why is there a bullet hole in his forehead?

DCI Harry Nelson & DS Dave Clough investigate Fred's death & meet the present day members of the Blackstock family, still living at the lonely family farm near the crash site. Fred's brother, Old George, is still alive & living with his son, Young George & Young George's wife, Sally. George & Sally's son, Chaz, has started a pig farm on some of the family land, & their daughter, Cassandra, is an actress, recently returned home. The land where the plane was found belonged to the Blackstocks but has recently been sold to a developer. The construction work on the new estate uncovered the plane.Old George is the only member of his generation left. His older brother Lewis disappeared after the war & Fred had moved to the United States before the war & was thought to have been killed in a plane crash after joining the US Air Force. The Blackstocks seem to be an unlucky family. Old George's mother said the land was cursed & that the sea would reclaim it one day, before drowning herself & Old George himself has become quite odd in his old age, his "funny turns" only whispered about by the family.

Further complications arise when a TV company wants to use Fred's story as the focus of an episode of their new series The History Men, looking at historical events through the personal stories of those involved. Fred left a wife & daughter in the States when he was killed & his daughter, Nell, travels to Norfolk for his funeral & to meet the family she barely knows. She's also agreed to appear in the TV program. At the funeral, a mysterious man with long grey hair appears & soon after, Cassandra is attacked in the churchyard. The investigations into Fred's death lead Nelson to suspect that one of the Blackstocks was responsible for moving Fred's body from its original burial place to the cockpit of the buried plane. He also suspects that one of the family was responsible for Fred's murder.

I love this series. It's an absorbing combination of archaeology, history & police procedural but, above all, it's the characters that make the series so compelling. Ruth & Nelson had a brief relationship that resulted in their daughter, Kate. Nelson has stayed married to Michelle, the mother of his two daughters, although he feels a protective concern for Ruth & Kate. Ruth has had half-hearted relationships with a couple of men (Frank Barker, the American historian Ruth met in the last book, returns to Norfolk with the film crew in this one) but she loves Nelson, even though she knows he won't leave Michelle. Nelson's team - Dave Clough, DS Judy Johnson & newcomer Tim Heathfield - all play an important role in the story although it's their personal connection & loyalty to the team that is paramount. Clough is the rough diamond of the team, rescuing Cassandra Blackstock from her attacker, & surprised by his own involvement in the Blackstock story. Judy Johnson is now living with Cathbad, Ruth's Druid friend, & very pregnant with her second child. Tim is a good policemen but there's something reserved in his manner that hints at a secret that prevents him bonding with his colleagues completely.

I enjoyed all the personal subplots, especially the fact that Cathbad's predictions about future events, usually foolproof, prove to be way off the mark on a couple of crucial points. Ruth is such an appealing character. She is always doubting her abilities as a single mother & dithering about her relationship with Frank; resenting Nelson's picky comments & over-protectiveness, yet wanting him to be part of Kate's life, & her own. The Norfolk landscape is the other attraction. The loneliness of the marshes where Ruth lives & the coastal areas is described so evocatively. The Ghost Fields is a very satisfying mystery & although I had an inkling about one of the characters, there were still plenty of surprises a second murder & two attempted murders to keep me occupied until the last page. My only problem with Elly Griffiths' books is that I read them too quickly & now I have another year to wait for the next installment.

Death's Dark Vale - Diney Costeloe

Adelaide Anson-Gravetty wakes up on the morning of her 21st birthday & discovers that she's not who she thought she was. A letter from a firm of solicitors informs her that she is not the daughter of the man she calls her father. Her half-French mother was married before & her first husband, Freddie Hurst, Adelaide's father, was killed during WWI. Richard Anson-Gravetty had married Heather Hurst when Adelaide was only a toddler. He adopted Adelaide but didn't want her to know about her father or his family. Adelaide was only permitted to speak French with her mother when they were alone &, although she's close to her French grandmother, she knows nothing of the Hurst family. Now, however, she discovers that she has come into a considerable fortune from her Hurst grandfather & also receives a letter, written by her late mother, telling her something of Freddie & explaining the reason for the secrecy about Adelaide's birth.

Adelaide also discovers that she has an aunt, Sarah, who is a nun in a French convent. Worried that her grandfather's will makes no mention of Sarah, Adelaide visits her, now Reverend Mother Marie-Pierre, & learns more about her father, Freddie. She also meets her great-aunt Anne, Sister St Bruno, an elderly nun, almost bedridden but with a sharp mind. Sarah explains how she came to enter a French convent (a story told in Diney Costeloe's earlier novel, The Ashgrove, which I read last year) & that Adelaide need not worry about her inheritance. Sarah received her inheritance from her father as a dowry when she entered the convent. After nursing in the convent hospital during the war, Sarah stayed on & now, almost twenty years later, she is Reverend Mother of the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy in St Croix. Adelaide is happy to have made contact & delighted to learn about her birth family. She returns home, goes to university & life goes on.

Two years later, in 1939, war breaks out. In France, Reverend Mother Marie-Pierre finds herself & her convent involved in this war as they had been in the last. The convent hospital cares for the local people but soon, refugees fleeing from the advancing German army are also in need of help. Sarah takes in the children of a Jewish woman killed when a group of refugees are bombed & hides them among a small group of orphans that the convent cares for. She has no illusions as to their fate if the Germans should find them & eventually she takes them to the Mother House of the Order in Paris where their story will not be known.

An English airman is shot down & finds his way to the convent. Sarah & Sister Marie-Marc hide him in the cellars & get him away by disguising him as a nun & taking him to Albert, where a sympathetic priest, Father Bernard, helps him get home. Sarah is reluctant to get involved in any more illegal activities, conscious that she has the responsibility of the welfare of all the nuns. She is also well aware that not all the nuns are willing to disobey the German regulations & there are informers among the villagers who would profit from informing on Sarah if they discovered what was happening. She may have lived in France for over 20 years but many remember that she is English & there is also some resentment that she has been promoted to Reverend Mother at such a young age. The German commander, Major Thielen, is suspicious of Sarah's activities but finds nothing on searching the convent. He is also Catholic & has a certain reverence for the convent & the sisters. That cannot be said of Colonel Hoch, a Gestapo officer who arrives in St Croix soon after, determined to find any traitors, as he calls them, who may be assisting the Resistance or harbouring Jews.

Adelaide, meanwhile, has been recruited to the SOE. Determined to do some war work, she joined up as a driver with the WAAF but, with her fluent French, was soon sounded out about her willingness to be dropped into France to help a Resistance network helping Allied soldiers escape. When Terry, the airman helped by Sarah, returns to England, & Adelaide's connection to the convent are discovered, she is sent to St Croix to make contact with Sarah & see if the convent is a suitable place to use in the escape route.

Death's Dark Vale is an exciting story full of suspense & danger. Adelaide & Sarah are both wonderful heroines, incredibly brave & resourceful. Their stories reflect those of many people during WWII who risked their own lives to help others. However, there are just as many characters determined to thwart their plans, whether from cowardice or greed. There's a real sense of the terror of the times as the Germans settled in to occupation, stealing the convent's chickens & appearing at any time to conduct a search, respecting no one & questioning everything they're told. The anguish of not knowing who to trust was ever-present & Adelaide experiences this just as much as Sarah. They are always aware that their actions have consequences, not only for themselves but for the people who help them & the people they're trying to help & not all their plans are successful. I also loved the impressive level of detail in the descriptions of Adelaide's training & then her mission in France as well as the many contrivances of Sarah & Sister Marie-Marc as they try to outwit the Germans.

As I mentioned when I reviewed The Ashgrove, Diney is a friend from my online reading group & she kindly sent me a copy of Death's Dark Vale to review.

Death is a Word - Hazel Holt

The Sheila Malory series by Hazel Holt has always been one of my favourites & Death is a Word is the final book in the series. Set in the fictional town of Taviscombe in Dorset, my interest has always been just as much in Sheila's life, interests & friends as it has been in the various murder mysteries she's found herself involved in.

In this final book, Sheila's friend Rosemary's cousin Eva Jackson has moved back to the area after the death of her husband, Alan. Alan had been a journalist, a foreign correspondent, but instead of being killed in some overseas conflict, he died in London of kidney failure. Eva has a garage full of Alan's papers & Rosemary is keen to help her settle in to her new life, encouraging her to sort through the papers so they can be edited for publication. Sheila is less keen. A widow herself, she knows how raw emotions can be & tries to rein Rosemary in a little. Eva's son, Dan, lives in London & works for a foodie magazine. His relations with his mother are affectionate but a little remote. Both very private people, they've never been very close although he does visit her in Taviscombe & meets Sheila, Rosemary & Rosemary's formidable mother, Mrs Dudley.

Sheila's bossy friend Anthea, who runs local cultural centre Brunswick Lodge, is keen to get Eva involved in her many plans for talks & events. Luckily her attention is soon taken by another new arrival to the area, Donald Webster. Donald has recently retired from working in South America for a pharmaceutical company & seems happy to go along with Anthea's plans. He seems helpful, polite & enthusiastic but Sheila can't help feeling that there's something odd about a successful businessman choosing to retire to sleepy Taviscombe where he has no ties or family associations. Eva becomes interested in researching her family history & Rosemary is pleased that she's moving on from Alan's death. However, she's a little put out when Eva & Donald Webster begin going out together.

Sheila & Rosemary are shocked when Eva dies suddenly. She had been suffering from a virus & the coroner concludes that she must have felt so ill that she forgot to take the insulin for her diabetes. Eva's son, Dan, & his partner Patrick come down for the funeral & decide to stay on in Eva's cottage while Dan decides what to do next. He decides to continue the genealogical research his mother had started. Dan & Patrick seem content to stay at the cottage & Dan becomes very fond of Mrs Dudley, visiting her to ask about the family & looking through her photo albums. One morning, Dan is knocked down by a car & killed while on his usual morning run. Sheila begins to suspect that Dan's death wasn't an accident or a random hit & run. If Dan's death wasn't accidental, could there be more to Eva's death? Was there something in Alan's papers (there was that suspicious fire in the shed where they were stored) or could Eva's genealogical research have disturbed family secrets? Sheila talks to everyone, comes up with several incorrect theories but eventually realises that there can only be one solution, however unlikely it seems.

This is a very satisfying mystery with everything I enjoy about English small town (or village) stories. Sheila is a widow, with a married son, a dog, Tris & cat, Foss, who rule her life in a very believable way! I'm also very fond of Mrs Dudley, who dominates Rosemary's life but is really quite vulnerable & a little lonely. The small town atmosphere of walks by the shore, morning coffee & visits to the theatre in Bath is very inviting, everything a cosy mystery should be, really. It's a shame that there will be no more books in the series but also reassuring that Hazel Holt didn't feel the need to kill off anyone apart from the designated victims. Hazel Holt's books have been brought back into print in recent years by Coffeetown Press & her books about her friend, Barbara Pym, the biography, A Lot To Ask & the edited diaries & letters, A Very Private Eye, are now available as ebooks or POD paperbacks from Bello.

The Advent of Murder - Martha Ockley

Faith Morgan is the relatively new vicar at St James's, Little Worthy. Faith used to be a policewoman & some of her former colleagues, especially former boyfriend Ben Shorter, find her change of career, & her vocation, hard to accept. In the first book in the series, The Reluctant Detective, Faith found herself in the middle of a murder investigation when she'd only just arrived in Little Worthy. Now, when murder touches Faith & her congregation again, she finds it difficult to resist doing a little investigating of her own. Her police training & natural nosiness are an irresistible combination.

Advent is a busy time for Faith. She has all her usual duties plus the Christmas pageant to organise. Churchwarden Pat Montesque never lets Faith forget just how important the pageant is to the parish & Faith's immediate problem is finding a donkey to carry Mary in the procession. On her way to talk to new parishioner Oliver Markham, the Joseph in the production, Faith comes across a police team investigating the discovery of a young man's body by the river on Markham's land. Detective Inspector Ben Shorter is heading the investigation but Faith gets more information from Sergeant Peter Gray, a friend & parishioner. The boy, Lucas Bagshaw, has been hit on the head & had then fallen into the river somewhere upstream of the place where he was found.

Faith discovers that Lucas belonged to the youth choir run by junior choirmaster Jim Postlethwaite, a charismatic man who is determined to make a success of the choir even if some of the clergy at the cathedral are sceptical. Lucas had dropped out of school following the death of his mother some months earlier. His father had never been on the scene & his only relative was his mother's younger brother Adam, an ex-soldier & alcoholic. Lucas's best friends Vernon & Anna, known as V & the Dot, are shocked by his death but unwilling to give Faith or the police much information. As Faith struggles to balance her busy work life with her sister's increasingly urgent demands that they talk about their mother's health, she also becomes more involved with the investigation into Lucas's death. Everyone involved has secrets they are determined to keep but murder tends to reveal much more than just the name of the murderer & this case is no exception.

This is the first mystery & the first contemporary book I've read in a while. A mention of The Reluctant Detective on a blog somewhere reminded me that I downloaded this second book & hadn't yet read it. That's one of the disadvantages of a Kindle, it's so easy to forget what I have on it. Discovering that the third book in the series, A Saintly Killing, is due to be published next month, made me want to read this one immediately. I'm so glad I did because I enjoyed it just as much as the first book.

Faith is such a sympathetic character & her great enthusiasm for her new life & vocation is very touching. This time, we learn a little more about some of her parishioners, particularly spiky Pat Montesque & Faith also has a little flutter of romance with Jim Postlethwaite. Unfortunately taking him along for dinner with Peter Gray & his wife is a disaster when Ben Shorter turns up with his date, the pathologist working on the Lucas Bagshaw case. Jim's uneasiness & Ben's antagonism make for a very uncomfortable evening. It shows Faith how difficult it can be to separate work & friends & her previous life in the Force from her new life in the Church. I enjoyed all the details of Faith's working life & her tentative relationship with a cat she calls The Beast is also endearing if you happen to be a cat lover. We know who's going to come out on top there. I'm very much looking forward to reading the next book in the series & I'm determined that it won't get lost on my Kindle. I'm going to read it before it disappears from that first screen!

Invisible - Christine Poulson

Jay & his family are settling in to a new house. But this isn't a planned move. Jay is in witness protection & his wife, Mia & son, Sam, seem unsure & a little apprehensive about their new circumstances. Next morning, a devastating explosion kills Mia & Sam & leaves Jay with physical & mental scars.

Five years later, Jay is still in hiding, but from who & what, we don't know. He is having an affair with Lisa, a single mother caring for a teenage son, Ricky, with cerebral palsy. Lisa & Ricky lived with her father, Lawrence, until his recent death & she is still grieving for him & the support he always gave her. Lisa & Jay met through a mutual interest in Chinese culture & continued to meet one weekend a month, always in out of the way cottages. The relationship suited Lisa. Ricky & his needs always came first & Jay understood that & never wanted more than she was willing to give. Lisa's ex-husband, Barry, had left when Ricky was a baby, unable to cope with his disability. He had always contributed financially but has had no contact with Lisa or Ricky for years. Suddenly, Barry turns up with a proposal that disconcerts Lisa & threatens to change her relationship with her son.

Lisa told no one about Jay, although she suspected that Lawrence had an idea that she was meeting someone on her precious weekends away. They lived in the moment so it didn't seem odd that Jay never talked about his family, his past or the scar on his face. But, after a visit to a stately home one weekend, things changed. Jay became reluctant to leave their rental cottage, no more visits to museums or eating out. Then, Lisa arrives for the weekend & Jay doesn't show up. At first, she's desperate, thinking he's had an accident or has been taken ill. She can't contact him, he doesn't phone or write, & she begins to discover how little she really knew about the man she loved. As her friend, Stella, says, "In my experience these things hardly ever come out of the blue. So often there are warning signs, just little things that you didn't want to see at the time. It's only when you look back that you realise." Stella thinks that Jay was married & that he's dumped Lisa when he was found out. The truth is so much more complicated, as Lisa discovers when she begins to look for those little moments, those hints that something was not quite right.

Jay, on the other hand, has realised that falling in love with Lisa was the biggest mistake he could have made. He's working on a plan to take revenge on the man who forced him into witness protection & killed his family. He knows he can't contact Lisa but doesn't realise that, as well as putting his own head above the parapet, he's also put her in great danger.

Invisible is a great thriller. I can't say too much more about the plot because the twists & turns are the whole point of reading a book that wrong foots the reader at every turn. I really needed to concentrate, especially in the beginning as many characters are introduced & their relevance only becomes clear as events unfold.  In the end, I just put aside an afternoon to finish it because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. Invisible is more than a conventional thriller though, because we have the domestic, ordinary story of Lisa & Ricky alongside the story of Jay. This was the real attraction of the book for me. I'm not a fan of thrillers which are just one long chase after another with a little violence thrown in. As a fan of Spooks (I never missed an episode), I also loved the way Jay carried out his plans & Lisa's trip to the British Library - I can't say any more! Christine Poulson kept me reading by giving out just enough information to intrigue & puzzle so that I had to read just one more chapter. That's why, in the end, I just dropped everything else & read the last half of Invisible in one sitting.

I loved Christine's earlier series of crime novels featuring Cambridge academic Cassandra James & I still live in hope that there will be another Cassandra mystery one of these days. The series is available in ebook format, & the first book, Murder is Academic, is available in paper from Ostara Publishing, which has a great classic crime list. I read Invisible as a Kindle ebook & it's also available in paperback. There's more information at Christine's blog, A Reading Life.

The Outcast Dead - Elly Griffiths

At an archaeological dig at Norwich Castle, once used as a jail & site of executions, forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway discovers a skeleton that she believes could belong to the notorious 19th century baby farmer, Jemima Green. Green was known as Mother Hook because she had lost a hand & wore a hook instead. The remains Ruth has found are in the right place & have a hook where a hand should be. Ruth's boss, Phil, ever avid for publicity, is keen to participate in a TV program, Women Who Kill. Jemima, Mother Hook, hanged for the murder of five children in her care, is the perfect subject for the program. Ruth is uncomfortable with the sensationalist slant of the program (& with the thought of appearing on camera) but the new director, Dani White, seems to be trying to present a more nuanced view. She's up against the relentlessly tabloid style of the show's star, Corinna Lewis.

DCI Harry Nelson is investigating a case that brings back memories of some of his most disturbing cases. A baby, David Donaldson, has been found dead in his cot. His two older siblings, Samuel & Isaac, also died young & what looked like a tragic coincidence, may be more sinister. David's mother, Liz, is now a suspect, & Nelson has to tread a fine line between investigating a possible murder & being seen as persecuting a grieving mother. Then, a child is abducted from her home & a note signed The Childminder, is found at the scene. The long ago case of Jemima Green seems to be reaching out to the present in some very disturbing ways.

I'm a fan of this series & The Outcast Dead is one of the most involving cases so far. Ruth Galloway is such a sympathetic character. She had a brief affair with Nelson, resulting in the birth of her daughter, Kate. Nelson stayed with his wife but finds himself drawn back to Ruth & wanting to be involved in Kate's life. Ruth knows that Nelson will never leave his family but can't help thinking about him. Other relationships don't stand much of a chance. She meets American historian, Frank Barker, & although they have a lot in common, there's no real spark there for Ruth.

Nelson's team also plays an important part in the series. Judy Johnson had an affair with Ruth's friend, Cathbad, & although she became pregnant, she went ahead with her wedding to Darren. Now she feels torn between her life with Darren & Michael & her love for Cathbad. Cathbad is one of my favourite characters. A Druid with a keen awareness of atmosphere & emotions that's almost psychic at times, he moved away to give Judy a chance to sort herself out but he's just as miserable as she is. Cathbad is convinced that Liz Donaldson is innocent & Ruth becomes involved in the present day case even as she learns more about Jemima Green & what really happened to the babies she cared for.

The Outcast Dead is a great example of an intelligent police procedural with the added interest of the historical & archaeological investigation. As the series progresses, the interwoven relationships of the main characters become more integral to the plots & never more so than in this story which has some moments of real anguish. I'm not very good at working out whodunit & I was misled by at least one of the red herrings but the clues are there & even the psychic consulted by the police at Cathbad's insistence contributes to the very satisfying solution to the mystery.

The Perfect Match - Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde's books are always a treat, as comforting as a cup of tea & a Sunday afternoon in my favourite reading chair. Her new novel, The Perfect Match, delivers all the bucolic Englishness we've come to expect although I didn't find the main romance quite as involving as usual this time around.

Bella Castle is a real estate agent in a small country town. She left her home town three years before after falling in love with a married man. Although their relationship consisted of nothing but flirting over the photocopier & a kiss under the mistletoe, once she realised Dominic was married & that his wife was pregnant, Bella left. Now, she has her life completely on track. She lives with her godmother, Alice, loves her job & is practically engaged to her boss, Nevil.

Bella is the kindest, most considerate & altruistic real estate agent I've ever met in fiction. She goes to endless trouble with picky clients & becomes friends with an elderly lady, Jane Langley, who doesn't want to sell her big, inconvenient house but is worried about the future when she can no longer manage the house & her beautiful garden. Nevil imagines that Bella's visits to Jane are a way of softening her up for the eventual sale of her house but Bella is genuinely concerned for Jane, who becomes a friend. Imagine Bella's dismay when Jane's nephew comes to visit & he turns out to be Dominic Thane, the man she left her previous job & life for. Bella is already having doubts about her relationship with Nevil & her doubts increase when she begins to suspect that he's involved in some dodgy property deals. Her decision to look for evidence of these deals leads her into potential danger.

Bella's godmother, Alice, is in her sixties, happy with her life although she is starting to get itchy feet in her comfortable domesticity after a life of travel. When she meets Michael on the train one day, there's an immediate attraction although she's reluctant to make too much of it as she's several years older than he is. However, Michael isn't deterred & their relationship moves quickly. Michael's two daughters are not so welcoming & Alice has to make some crucial decisions about her future.

Dominic could never understand why Bella left so abruptly & believes the rumours at their workplace that she had covered up for his wife, Celine, who was having an affair. Their marriage broke up soon afterwards. Dominic isn't happy to discover that Bella is his aunt's friend & Bella is dismayed to realise that she is still in love with Dominic. Their friendship slowly develops as misunderstandings are cleared away & Bella asks Dominic's help with her investigations into Nevil's shifty dealings.

The Perfect Match is a lovely book to read on a Sunday afternoon although I don't think it's as good as her earlier novels. Bella is a sweet girl but I couldn't understand why she was still with the odious Nevil. He might have built up her confidence when she first arrived but she really only seems to be still with him because she loves her job & knows he'd sack her if she broke up with him. Every word he says & every assumption he makes just shows that they're poles apart in values, morals & everything that matters. It surely didn't take her three years & the arrival of Dominic to work this out. Bella & Dominic's romance never really gets off the ground, they have so many obstacles to get over. I did love Alice & Michael's story & this reminds what I love about Katie Fforde's earlier novels. They were about older women still living interesting lives, having relationships & fitting all that in with busy lives. I believed in Alice where I didn't really believe in Bella.

The Beautiful Mystery - Louise Penny

I mentioned a couple of months ago when I was reviewing Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes, that I love a mystery set in a closed community. Several people have also recommended Louise Penny's series of police procedurals set in Canada. So, instead of starting at the beginning of the series (which is what I'd normally do) I thought I'd read The Beautiful Mystery, which is set in a Gilbertine monastery in a remote wilderness.

Sûreté officers Chief Inspector Armand Gamache & Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir are called to the monastery, Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups (St Gilbert among the wolves), when the body of the Prior & Choirmaster, Frère Mathieu, is found in the Abbot's private garden. Frère Mathieu had been killed by a blow from a heavy object & he was curled up, clutching a piece of parchment with Gregorian chant written on it. The abbot, Dom Philippe, & all the monks seem shocked by the murder & almost as horrified by the intrusion of the police into their sanctuary.

The monastery had been hidden, unknown for centuries, until a recording of the monks singing their Gregorian chants, found its way into the outside world & caused a sensation. Since then, the monks had almost been under siege by tourists & the media. It soon becomes obvious that the recording has brought benefits & disadvantages. The money from the recording has paid for geothermal heating & solar power but the intrusion of the outside world & the temptation to leave their enclosed order & go out into the world, giving concerts & interviews, has split the community.

The monks have been divided into Abbot's men, who don't want to leave their seclusion & the Prior's men, who want to take the opportunity to secure the community's finances & spread the word of God through their music. Gamache & Beauvoir must disentangle the possible motives of these men who follow a vow of silence which makes them extraordinarily observant of each other & of the police. As they get to know the monks - Frère Raymond, who looks after the practicalities of the geothermal plant, Frère Charles, the doctor, Frère Simon, the abbot's secretary & Frère Luc, the youngest & newest member of the congregation, who is the porter - they also begin to absorb the atmosphere of the monastery & the division of the day into periods of prayer & plainchant signalled by bells.

The arrival of Gamache's superior officer, Superintendent Francoeur, leads to increased tension as Sûreté departmental politics & old enmities are unleashed. Francoeur & Gamache are bitter enemies & Francoeur is determined to undermine Gamache's position, both by arriving to oversee the investigation & by playing on Beauvoir's insecurities. Some months before, Gamache had led a group of his agents into a situation in which several of them were killed & he & Beauvoir were severely injured. Beauvoir became addicted to painkillers & has only recently recovered. Beauvoir has also fallen in love with Gamache's daughter, Annie, & they're waiting for the right moment to tell Gamache & his wife.

The Beautiful Mystery is an absorbing mystery. I loved the setting. The monastery in the wilderness is beautifully described. I could see the corridors, the chapel, the gardens & the tiny cells where the monks slept. I also loved all the musical background that informed the plot. The beautiful mystery of the title is the name that was given to the sublime sounds of the Gregorian chants. The monks of  Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups have taken the art of the chant to sublime heights & I was as enchanted as Gamache by the experience of hearing them, even if it was only in my mind. Gamache is a very sympathetic investigator who obviously cares about his whole team & the integrity of the Sûreté as a whole.

Louise Penny does a great job of filling in new readers who haven't read the earlier books in the series. I felt I knew exactly what was going on with Gamache & Francoeur, their past relationship & the backstory to the hatred between them as well as the father-son relationship between Gamache & Beauvoir. My only quibble with the book is the length. 500pp is just too long for a police procedural.  I can't think of any mystery novel that needs to be more than 300pp. I stopped reading Elizabeth George because every novel was longer than the last & the investigative element became swamped in the minutiae of the lives of the protagonists. I enjoy following the characters from one novel to the next but sometimes the mystery is lost. However, The Beautiful Mystery is an excellent example of the closed community crime novel & there is much to enjoy in this story of monks, music & murder.

Jeeves & Anna

I've just had a couple of weeks leave & I've had a lovely time pottering in the garden & the house & reading quite a lot. These are a couple of the books I've read over the past fortnight.

I've never been a fan of prequels, sequels, missing chapters etc of my favourite novels. I'd rather just reread the originals & in the case of P G Wodehouse, I still have many books to read before I run out. So, I thought I'd give Sebastian Faulks' new novel, which he calls a homage to Wodehouse, a miss. However, my friend Barbara, who blogs at Milady's Boudoir (now there's a Wodehouse reference), recommended it so I thought I should give it a go. I'm so glad I did because it's terrific. I read it in two sittings & laughed out loud more than once. With Wodehouse (or a homage), that counts as a successful reading experience.

Bertie Wooster has been on holidays on the Côte d’Azur where he meets Georgiana Meadowes, the ward of Sir Henry Hackwood. Even though Bertie is known for getting involved in dubious engagements, he is really very taken with Georgiana but thinks she is far above his reach. She's also engaged to Rupert Venables, a young man with the money to dig Sir Henry out of a financial hole & allow him to stay at his family home, Melbury Hall. Back in London, Bertie's old friend Woody Beecham comes to him with a dilemma. He wants to marry Amelia Hackwood, daughter of Sir Henry, but has no money & so Sir Henry isn't keen. Either Amelia or Georgiana must marry money to save Melbury Hall.

Amelia has broken off her engagement with Woody because she says he was flirting with some girls from the village while Woody says he was just being polite. Woody asks for advice from Jeeves & an ingenious plan is put in train. Jeeves & Bertie decide to help Woody by being on the spot near Melbury Hall to offer advice. The plan also saves Bertie from the perils of a visit from his Aunt Agatha who has invited herself to stay. Being so close to Georgiana is another incentive. Unfortunately the plan is derailed by circumstances which mean that Jeeves ends up impersonating Lord Etringham, an elderly peer, & Bertie masquerades as his manservant, Wilberforce. The complications multiply &, although Bertie isn't at all sure about his vocation as a servant, Jeeves seems to be enjoying his new role a little too much.

Sebastian Faulks has written a beautifully judged novel that reproduces all the familiar tropes without becoming a caricature. He makes it seem effortless which is the point of Wodehouse. The great set pieces of the village cricket match & the dinner party where Bertie tips a bowl of gooseberry fool into the lap of Dame Judith Puxley are funny & heart-stopping at the same time. I don't think any fan of Wodehouse could possibly be offended by this good-natured & affectionate tribute.

The category I think of as Nice Books has almost totally disappeared, although fortunately there are still some nice books. It is difficult to say just what qualifies a novel for it. The absence of gross language is, of course, essential, as is the absence of sexual impropriety, at least on the part of the hero and heroine. Perhaps the most noticeable feature of a Nice Book is, even when accompanied by sad or unpleasant events, a feeling of geniality and happiness. It also requires a feeling of geniality and happiness.

Wendy Forrester is describing Olivia in India, the first novel by O Douglas, but she could be describing any of O Douglas's novels. Wendy Forrester's biography of the author shows just how closely the life & the novels were connected.

O Douglas was the pen name of Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan, author of many novels & Govenor-General of Canada. Anna chose her pen name for her novels of domestic life because she didn't want to be seen to be cashing in on her brother's fame. All her novels are similar in theme & setting. Apart from Olivia in India they are all set primarily in Scotland. There's also a certain amount of autobiography in the novels. There's often a small boy based on Alistair, Anna's younger brother who was killed in WWI. Priorsford, where several novels are set, was based on Peebles, where Anna lived with her brother, Walter.  

The Setons, which I read recently, seems to be the most autobiographical novel she wrote. The manse family living in Glasgow, the move to the country when the father retires, the young brother, Duff, based on Alistair Buchan, the impact of WWI on the family. The only difference is the absence of Mrs Buchan. In the novel, Elizabeth's mother has died before the novel begins. Maybe this was because Anna, Walter & their mother lived together for over 20 years after Mr Buchan's death & Anna was wary of putting a recognisable portrait of her mother into her fiction. Forrester does see echoes of Mrs Buchan in other novels such as Mrs Laidlaw in Eliza For Common with her pride in being able to furnish a manse for her husband. One novel, Ann and her Mother, is about a woman writing a biography of her mother. It seems that Anna was writing a biography of Mrs Buchan in this novel.

Anna Buchan lived a quiet life. She wrote her novels, kept house for her brother, was involved in local activities & took some pride in the success of her books with readers & critics. This review in the Times Literary Supplement is a little condescending, it nevertheless sums up the appeal of O Douglas's novels.

Penny Plain is a very able and delightful book, but it is not the kind of book that the Marxian kind of person would like. Nor does the author like the Marxian kind of person. the author is not ashamed of taking pleasure in homeliness ... If we hold that the creator is entitled to deal with anything which exists, then he (or she) is entitled to talk about lamplit cheerfulness just as much as about passion and agony. The result, in this case, is certainly very pleasant.

Anna Buchan and O Douglas is a slight book of only 120pp. Wendy Forrester tells the story of the author's life simply & with sympathy & affection, both for the author herself & her books. This is a lovely companion volume to the novels & I'm looking forward to reading more of them in the future.