Material Witness

REVIEW: Cry for Help by Steve Mosby

If Steve Mosby had a motto, it might be "Making You Think". His last novel, The 50/50 Killer, he set readers the agonising conundrum of exactly how they would react if they were forced to make the choice between their own life and that of their partner.

In Cry For Help, a book that confirms Mosby's status as a crime writer of great ability and originality, he changes tack slightly, exploring the idea of the responsibility we have for the health, welfare and happiness of friends, colleagues and family.

It's a very modern question. We live in an increasingly mobile, fragmented and, many would say, selfish society. Rather than living in communities, as we might have done 50 years ago, with families on the doorsteps and knowing a great many of our neighbours, life in this decade is more likely to be characterised by us living in isolation from family and unknown to those around us.

In recent years we've probably become even more detached, eschewing even telephone conversations in favour of briefer, less personal forms of communication: text, email, IM, even Facebook.

And so you might have heard from your best friend five or six times this week and feel you know what they're up to. That they're OK. But you probably haven't spoken to them. So while you assume all is well, if you think about it clearly, they may not. Someone may have that phone, access to that e-mail account.

This is the situation confronting Detective Sam Currie, who investigates the deaths of women who have been left to die of thirst alone, while their friends have been reassured they are OK using texts and emails.

And as Currie's investigation develops, revealing the existence of particularly cruel, manipulative and sadistic killer, the theme of responsibility abounds. Both Currie, and the book's second central character, Dave Ellis, a journalist and magician linked to one of the missing girls, are haunted by events in their past, moments when they might have done more to help someone important in their life. Ellis is driven not to repeat earlier mistakes and consequently is dragged into the killer's deadly game when a vulernable former girlfriend appears to go missing.

Cry for Help is a multi-threaded book, following several different characters, one of them, Ellis, in the first person, others in the third. Handled badly, this could have been a distraction, but actually works to the benefit of a book, which spends so much time examining personal conscience as the decisions that Ellis is forced to make are life or death choices for others.

The story is clever, but not so clever it ever feels contrived, and the narrative well paced from a good set-up that traps the reader to a gripping and violent climax. And what is apparent throughout is the Mosby can really write. His characters are rounded, convincing and humanly flawed. His dialogue is right out of the top drawer. Characters in some books sound as if their speech has been written with the moment in mind where they are being spoken on a set in Hollywood by Bruce Willis or Matt Damon. Not so here. The characters sound and behave like real people. And that might sound simple, but if it was then more people would be able to do it.

Cry for Help is a first rate thriller, compelling and thought-provoking. While it is a dark book, occupying some of the less hospitable corners of the human psyche, it's not quite the twisted fairy tale / horror story that The 50/50 Killer is, and should prove more mainstream than that book, because as good is as it was, it didn't earn Mosby the audience he deserved.

Here's hoping Cry for Help does. 

Cry for Help will be published by Orion Books in May.

REVIEW: The Girl of His Dreams by Donna Leon

Life can be a pretty complicated business for a liberal. How would one take, for example, as Donna Leon does, the plight of eastern European gypsies, driven from the lands of their birth by oppressive regimes, denied their traditional way of life by the imposition of modern norms and forced into little more than holding camps on the ugly edges of industrial cities?

Hated by their new neighbours, they find themselves all but unemployable.  They turn instead to activities either on the very fringes of legality - "used car sales" - or those that cross every legal boundary there is, and most moral and ethical ones beside: sending their children into the city to burgle homes and pick pockets.

For many this presents a crisis of conscience: sympathy for the plight of the gypsies, disgust at their behaviour, but then the quandary at the core of the liberal dilemma: do they behave like this because they have no choice, because our society has forced them into a corner, or is it because they have chosen to behave in this way?

This is a struggle that Ispettore Vianello, Commissario Guido Brunetti's partner, grapples with in The Girl of His Dreams, the 17th book in a series that has managed to sustain the very highest quality.

Brunetti and Vianello are thrown into the world of the gypsies, or Rom, when they fish the body of a pretty young girl out of a canal one rainy morning. They quickly establish that the girl was almost certainly burgling a nearby house of a middle class couple. The question to be answered is: how did she end up in the canal?

And here the moral maze becomes that little bit more labyrinthine: it is a question that the wider Questura, in the form of the preening, social-climbing Vice-Questore Patta, simply does not want answered. A gypsy girl, a burglar to boot, has died; very sad, but really, she only had herself to blame... And it was an accident, surely? And, of course, nobody wants to embarrass the burgled couple, particularly when it transpires that their daughter is dating the wayward son of the Interior Minister.

Those familiar with Donna Leon's work will recognise the distinctive Italian pattern here: the police, the government and the other arms of state protect and serve, but they do not do so equally. Money and connections buy these services. If you have neither, you may as well not exist.

That means that, as they often do, Brunetti and Vianello are forced to undertake an investigation that their superiors have ordered them to wind up, and so consequently they have little expectation that they will be able to deliver justice for the victim.

There is no doubt that over the years, Donna Leon has become increasingly disenchanted with Italian politics and society. The barometer for this is the conversation around the Brunetti dining table - a place of rich, sumptuous feasts - and the chats between Vianello and Brunetti as they catch the vaparetto from one crime scene to the next.

And there is now little more than utter contempt for authority in the form of politicians and senior officers and a sense of resignation about the situation. And in the absence of leadership with integrity, the Brunettis brings up their children to know right from wrong and behave as responsible citizens with a strong strain of social conscience. And Vianello and Brunetti investigate every crime with the rigour it deserves, irrespective of who the victim is or the social standing of the suspect.

These are beautiful, beautiful books. The grace of Donna Leon's writing matches the elegance and splendour of its location. Vianello, Brunetti and his wife Paola, are likable, well-adjusted humane people, living in a rotten, corrupt society and doing what they can every day to improve it.

And this book, The Girl of His Dreams, is as good as any of the previous 16, and perhaps it is the best. The ending is as moving as anything I can recall reading anywhere. The book will make you smile, laugh and shake your head. It will make you angry and unable to believe that in a modern European democracy (if that description actually fits Italy, and I doubt it does) the affairs of state could be carried out in such a corrupt fashion.

And finally, it might make you shed a tear or two, as it did me.

REVIEW: Hell's Fire by Chris Simms

Never judge a book by its back cover. For a couple of years now, Chris Simms' Manchester-based police procedurals have been dropping on the doormat with some regularity. For two years I had ignored them.

Something put me off, and I'm not quite sure what. Perhaps it was Manchester itself. A City I don't really know, feel no affinity for and was in no great hurry to familiarise myself with. For whatever reason, Simms' books joined the to read pile, but never quite made it to the top.

All of which is a great pity, because I could have discovered Chris Simms two years ago, and I would not now be playing catch up with his back catalogue.

And of course what I already knew was that given great writing and a strong plot, location doesn't necessarily matter one bit whether it's Manchester, Moscow or Manila. And so it is with Hell's Fire, a cracking procedural exploring some of the darker fringes of society where the ethically-challenged and greedy prey on the weak, needy and lonely.

Hell's Fire focuses on DI Jon Spicer's investigation into a series of church torchings which take a turn for the worse when a burnt corpse is found in the ruins. Satanic symbols found at the scene lead the Major Incident Team into an investigation which narrows down on a thriving occult scene around Manchester, and most notably a vampiric rock band and a "college" offering courses in sprituality and alternative religious systems.

The book spends a long time dwelling on religious issues. Spicer, a non-believer brought up in a strict religious household, finds himself refereeing an ongoing dispute between his devout mother and his tearaway younger sister who has joined a religion focused on human alignment with the natural world, and who is wrapped up in affairs at the dodgy college. And as the story progresses the dark secret of Spicer's sister's alienation from the church emerges to further complicate matters for the detective.

At the same time the attacks on the churches bring friction between established religion and its alternatives before new killings raise the stakes for all involved, and it becomes increasingly unclear which set is killing in homage to their own belief systems.

What works brilliantly here is the portrayal of the problems that come with uncompromising conviction allied to a willingness to follow beliefs with action, action that might be called terrorism in another context.

Simms has a gift for writing people that allows him to manage this process. Spicer is everyman, a father and a husband with money worries and family problems like the rest of us. His sister is at once idealistic and angry, independent and desperately in need of society. Perhaps it is no coincidence that only Rick Saville, Spicer's gay partner, seems assured and at ease with himself.

And then beyond the characterisation, or perhaps through it, there is a great story: dark and compelling, and one that keeps the reader guessing right up to a gruesome but satisfying finale.

Simms is very good, and I only wish I had discovered that two years ago.

La Dolce Vita according to Donna Leon; Audio shorts; Russell Brand

"Because they were in a hurry, they decided not to have pasta and settled for a single dish of shrimp with vegetables and coriander. They shared a bottle of Gottardi pinot noir, turned down dessert, and finished with coffee."

Who could this be other than Guido Brunetti and Lorenzo Vianello? In the midst of what might be a murder investigation, and "in a hurry", there is time for lunch. Not a full lunch, granted, no pasta after all, but a decent-sounding lunch with a bottle of wine. How happy we would all be to make do with the Italian equivalent of the sandwich at the desk!

This is part of what makes Donna Leon's books so special: the very Mediterranean pace of life, and the appreciation of the finer things in life, and the well-adjusted likable detectives.

The Child of his Dreams, the new Brunetti novel, is wonderful. Review soon.

Audio shorts

Last week I praised the joys of the audio book, and this week, with quite a bit of travel behind me, went through a couple more.

Generally speaking I like my audio books unabridged, even if this means that the listening to them can go on for quite a while as many books run to more than a dozen hours and it's not always easy to find that kind of time.

So thanks to Chloe Healy at Macmillan for introducing me to the pleasures of the audio short: books abridged down to two or three hours. This week I tried H is for Homicide, by Sue Grafton, and Minette Walters' The Breaker.

The beauty of these is that they can be digested in a couple of car sittings, a round trip to Heathrow, for example, and give the listener a full story in a condensed time.

Sue Grafton's novels, generally pretty short anyway, are perfect for this sort of treatment. I got my first introduction to the Alphabet series via audio, an unabridged reading of J is for Judgment by Lorelei King. And so her's is the voice I hear in my head when I read Kinsey Milhone, and it was nice to hear her again reading H, with her sing-song upbeat voice that capture's Kinsey's sassy charm. H is one of the more distinctive books - Kinsey goes undercover in pursuit of insurance scammers - and it didn't seem to suffer much in the truncation.

Minette Walters I have never read for some reason, although I know plenty of people who have and who like her books, and so the CD book, read beautifully by Kevin Whateley of Lewis fame. It's a fascinating story, sordid sex and jjealous amongst the Dorset sailing set, which begins when the naked body of a young mother is washed up on an isoldated shoreline.

Walters' characters are rounded, real people, including her policemen and in particular the salt-of-the-earth PC Nick Ingram. And it is somewhat shocking in its exposure of what goes on ín seemingly normal households behind closed doors. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will look out for more of her work.

Russell Brand brightens up the sporting morning

There is so much sports' writing out there in the newspapers each morning that there is very little scope for originality any more. That is why I paricularly enjoy Russell Brand's idiosyncratic view of the sporting life each Saturday morning in the Guardian. He is surprisingly insightful, utterly original and always funny. But this morning, during an exposition on how football managers' lives are so difficult and the circumstance impacting their job security to fickle he surpassed himself.

Writing about how self-styled special one Jose Mourinho made Chelsea "palatable", even to West Ham fans like Brand, he came up with the following analogy:

"Figuratively the scenario is reminiscent of a girl I once dated who had an atrocious personality (cruel, racist, joyless) but a really nice arse. She was like her own arse's irritating best mate - I had to tolerate her to get to the arse. The arse in its spellbinding beauty made her many flaws tolerable - she later revealed she'd only gone out with me because she liked my cat so don't feel too sorry for her."

Strange but brilliant.

The art of audio: more than mere reading

Harry Flashman, Rugby School bully, hero of Jalalabad and comic creation of utter genius, has a most distinctive voice. You can hear him inside your head when reading the late George Macdonald Fraser's marvellous books.

He is haughty, mischievous, full of bravado, patronising and proud, terrified and self-obsessed. But he is also the consummate raconteur, recalling the high jinks of bygone ages: adventures experienced, horrible deaths averted, women conquered and great statesmen and kings toadied to. Flashy is a compex character when writing his memoirs, his great confessional, moving from the wistful reminiscences of loves won and lost, to the terror of torture and worse and through to the admissions that his glorious career was not all it might have seemed. He is thoughtful, reflective and humble in his dotage; conceited, bumptious and duplicitous in his youth.

It would be easy to play him as the ebullient, roistering toff. But it requires more range than that, something I may not have fully appreciated until listening to Rupert Penry-Jones, the celebrated star of Spooks who makes more women swoon even than Flashy did in his day, reading Royal Flash, one of the most engaging books of the series.

When you read the book of course, you can hear Flashman in your head as you want to hear it him and it is, of course, perfect - a communion between reader and writer. And that, of course, makes it dashed difficult for someone else to trump. So it has to be just so.

And Penry-Jones is spot on. There's a passage late in Royal Flash, where our anti-hero is making good his escape from Strackenz, that sums up not just Flashman, but perhaps the greatness of Macdonald Fraser as a comic novelist: "I take some pride in the fact that while thrones were toppling and governments were melting away overnight, I was heading home with a set of crown jewels. There's a moral there, I think, if only I could work out what it was."

There it all is, in just three lines: the essence of Flashman. Perhaps even the essence of Britain's relationship with our European neighbours: "Look them all, the stupid Jonny Foreigners playing their mad games. Still we've done OK, and we can watch the whole thing from the comfort of island sofas and laugh at the lot of them, if a little uncomfortably because we don't really understand what's going on or at what point it's going to bite us on the arse."

OK, so that's a stretch, of course. But the point is that it is a brilliant line, and it needs to be delivered equally brilliantly, and Penry-Jones gets it just right. There's a hint of a smile in his voice, a moment of smugness which drifts into a pensive finale, before moving swiftly on.

At it's best, the audio book is not just a reading, it's a one man stage show, capturing the drama and pathos of the book in tone and timing and expression.

Stephen Fry has done it with Harry Potter, to the extent, I'm sure that many many readers coming across the new books may see the faces of Daniel Radcliffe or Michael Gambon in their mind's eye, but they hear Fry.

I recently finished another audio book, this one the unabridged version of Next, Michael Crichton's genetic thriller. It's an extraordinary book, really, one part incomprehensible science journal, one part political polemic, one part thriller, cobbled together using newspaper reports, congressional speeches and more conventional narrative.

It's two most memorable characters are a four year transgenic chimpanzee-human cross called Dave, who disperses bullies threatening his human brother by hurling his own shit at them, and an African grey parrot named Gerard with full facility for speech, including extraordinary powers of mimicry and no little mathematical ability.

I don't know for sure, that if I had started reading it, I would have finished it. Bits of it are pretty dense and it was a struggle at times to see where the whole thing was heading and why.

But I didn't have to. I had the Audible audio version, read magnificenty by Dylan Baker, a hugely talented but under-rated actor. Baker's interpretation of Next and its extraordinary characters held the whole thing together for me, and in the end made it a hugely compelling exercise, one I was delighted to have read in the end.

The advent of the iPod, not to mention complementary technologies such as the iTrip player, have made audio books a lot more accessible (previously some of the Harry Potter books required dozens of CDs or 26 tapes, far too many to carry very far).

Time jogging, in the car or the air means a lot more time to listen and it is fantastic that such high quality art is available out there.

   

So many books, so little time

This is my favourite time of the year. The daffodils are in full bloom, the evenings grow lighter, the days warmer, the cricket season is just around the corner, and, best of all, the summer proofs start arriving in their droves.

This morning produced a particularly good haul. The new Lisa Gardner, Say Goodbye, the follow up to the excellent Hide, turned up in a care package from Orion, along with an interesting-looking thriller from Kenneth Cameron (who with his son writes the Gordon Kent thriller series, which I must admit I'd never heard of until today) called The Frightened Man, set in 1900 London.

But best of all comes the new book from Steve Mosby, author of The 50/50 Killer, one of the best books I read in 2007. Since RJ Ellory got Richard-and-Judy's recently, Mosby is now probably top of my "they deserve to be better known than they are" list. I can't wait to read Cry for Help and I hope it propels Steve into the big time.

Also sitting on the shelf is Peter James' new novel, Dead Man's Footsteps, the fourth Brighton outing in the Roy Grace series which is rapidly becoming one of the best in Britain.

Laura Lippman has long been a favourite and What the Dead Know, last year's standalone found the US bestseller charts. This year, Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan is back in what is suddenly (it seems to me, but then I did read the first six or seven in a few months) the 10th book in the series. These are always good and anything that can entertain both my mother and I must have a pretty diverse appeal.

I seem to be running low on Scandinavians, oddly enough, having gone through a what seems like dozens in recent months. There's a KO Dahl waiting to be read, The Man in the Window. And I just finished Mari Jungstedt's Unseen, a good story let down by a poor translation.

And right now, there's Brian McGilloway's Borderlands.I'm only 50 pages in but it doesn't take a critic, even an amateur one, to see why he's been winning so many plaudits. His second Gallows Lane, is on the pile, probably for an immediate follow up. And then there's Ann Cleves, Alex Carr,  Steve Hamilton and many more.

I need a holiday, but regrettably there are none in sight. Just a great many sleepless nights.

 

REVIEW: Spider by Michael Morley

In the pre-publicity for Spider, the debut novel of television producer Michael Morley, publisher Penguin describe a book aimed "at the heart of the James Patterson market".

Fifty pages in, it is not difficult to see why. The approach is Pattersonesque with short, snappy chapters opening the story quickly across a number of fronts and raising the tension early. For someone who has never been crazy about Patterson's writing this was not an encouraging sign, but it proved a false alarm. Spider eventually settled into a highly satisfying rhythm, that rattled along at a healthy pace throughout, rarely allowing the reader time to come up for air and building to a dramatic and breathless conclusion.

Having at first wondered whether I would actually finish the book, suddenly it was done and dusted in little more than 36 hours, and I could also see why Penguin described the book as the crime thriller every publisher wanted: it has all the makings of a summer blockbuster and could well make Morley a household name.

The set-up is classic psychological thriller: a serial killer who has evaded the FBI for several years, killing more than a dozen young women and mutilating their bodies is active again after a lull, but with a baffling change of behaviour, digging up the corpse of his first victim on an anniversary of her death and sending her skull with a message to the FBI.

At the same time the reader witnesses him taking another victim hostage in Brooklyn and torturing her and ultimately leaving her to starve to death.

We are also introduced to the profiler who has hunted her down, Jack King, now retired from the Feds after a physical breakdown brought on by the strain of the long pursuit. King, now living in Tuscany where he recuperates while running a boutique hotel with his wife.

King is an interestingly drawn protagonist, given that his first introduction is as somebody whom the job almost destroyed and is immediately a vulnerable, sympathetic character. No Jack Reacher, he. And so when a former acquaintance in the Italian equivalent of the FBI asks him to assist in an investigation into a murder in Livorno that bears the hallmarks of his nemesis, King is torn between his health and the wishes of his family on one side and his devotion to the job on the other, he is forced to take a tough decision, but ultimately follows his professional rather than personal instinct.

King is immediately drawn into the deadly web of the Spider who pulls strings on both sides of the Atlantic to draw the profiler back and forth.

The action shifts seamlessly between New York City and Italy, and the contrast between the quiet Tuscan hills and the teeming city makes for a balanced read. But Morley, in his first outing, shows an instinct for when to ratchet up the pace and tension and controls his narrative well, bringing it to a tense Transatlantic conclusion.

It is a fine debut, not without its flaws - look out for the "Elephant in the Room", a spectre it is somewhat difficult to believe that a supposed hotshot such as King can dismiss so easily - but it is controlled, well-written and ultimately difficult to put down. And if you are on a plane or a beach this summer looking for an entertaining diversion, then it could be just the book you're looking for.

REVIEW: Murder at Deviation Junction by Andrew Martin

As an inmate at a boarding school in the West Country of England in the mid-1980s I was unlucky enough to live in a house which had participated in one of the technology world's most celebrated failures: we had a Betamax video player.

That meant that by about 1986, when no new movies were being produced in the defunct format, we were left with about six films which we saw about three dozen times each. I don't recall the names of the others, but one of them was The Titfield Thunderbolt, a 1950s comedy about a steam train.

It is probably a charming film. But we all hated it, mostly because familiarity breeds contempt, but also because it was beloved of our unloved housemaster. He loved the film so we hated it, and grew to hate the whole idea of steam trains. We had a similar relationship with cross country running and the prohibition of alcohol.

All of which is a hopelessly long-winded way of saying that I was not naturally well disposed to Andrew Martin's novel, Murder at Deviation Junction, featuring "Jim Stringer, Steam Detective", a mystery set on the railways of northern England in 1909.

And that just goes to show that many of the prejudices we pick up in our youth - broccoli, girls, whisky -  for few good reasons, should be put away with other childish things.

Andrew Martin has wonderfully recreated a fascinating world, when the train was engine that ran Britain and populated it with people devoted to its peculiarities and charm, one in which timetables are sacrosanct and  those who stoked its fires and stood on the running boards were kings of all they surveyed. Perhaps, if Martin had been my housemaster, I could have become an enthusiast...

Stringer, the steam detective, based in York and generally charged with tracking fare dodgers and lost baggage swindlers, is returning to York (via Whitby) from a fruitless trip to Middlesbrough where he had been pursuing an early version of the football hooligan, finds himself stuck in snow in the Cleveland Hills, where he is on hand to witness the discovery of the corpse of a rail photographer in an unused siding.

Being ambitious - and up for a promotion to Sergeant which also carries the distant possibility of persuading his wife to pose for him clothed in nothing more than her elastic boots (you'll just have to read it, I have no further explanation that I can make sense with) - he decides to investigate despite being off his patch geographically and finding himself in conflict with his bullying boss.

In this he colludes with Stephen Bowman, roving reporter for The Railway Rover (steam lines had their own press as well as their own detectives) and the trail leads him from the drinking dens of Fleet Street up the Midlands, Northern and Highlands lines all the way to Scotland, where the trail leads to a group of men who previously traveled the Whitby line in the exclusive confines of their own Club class carriage.

If that all sounds unlikely, then nobody was more surprised than than me to be utterly charmed by the world of steam. I particularly liked Jim Stringer, an everyman sort racked with all sorts of modern afflictions: a social-climbing wife, career path uncertainties, financial worries and daydreams about elastic boots.

The plot is mostly very tight although the diversion to Scotland felt like little more than an excuse to explore distant rail services, and the writing is witty, engaging and natural.

Suddenly I am intrigued by steam, and the Martin back catalogue beckons.