Does the “biggest literary crisis in years” — well until the next one — have anything to offer readers of these effusions. The deception was fraudulent but scarcely murderous, other than for reputations and, possibly more consequentially, profits; but masses of screens have lit up to discuss the matter. Some of the comments are spot on and very relevant to detective fiction, notably, to quote Johanna Thomas-Corr, “a wider problem with groupthink and copycat commissioning in publishing”. (There are many instances of this, for example much of the author-focused PC anti-Empire stuff that Penguin Random House spins out with tedious predictability: you only should read it if, like me, you might have to review one or two).
Yet, there is also in Thomas-Corr’s piece a fair amount of twaddle, notably about “the lack of diversity in publishing … lived experience too.” In practice, you really do not need to have committed many murders to comment on the genre; there is certainly no clear tariff. The Critic need not ask me to carry out a “dry killing” at the Spectator summer party (if you do not know the difference between “dry” and “wet” killings look back through this series).
A key element missing in what I have read of the commentary concerns the overly close links between agents and commissioning editors, with the former validating what is often very weak and/or unreliable, and doing so simply because the author is on the list. In turn, the editor eases their task and covers their limitations with the deceptive persuasion of the agent, and thus the advance is saved.
Anyway, to books. A young woman blackmailed by her former lover with photos of her naked and posed may seem alas too modern, and certainly not a key element in a classic of 1938, but then you should not be so very lazy in your assumptions about Golden Age detective novels; although the casual condescending spite of many later and current commentators toward the period and its favourite writers is much at fault in shaping academic and popular views. Writing as Carter Dickson, John Dickson Carr’s The Judas Window (1938; British Library Crime Classics, 2025, £10.99) is brilliant — an acknowledged masterpiece of the locked room genre that takes on greater interest through being presented, after a scene-setting Prologue, as a courtroom drama in a well-realised Old Bailey. The irascible but brilliant Sir Henry Merrivale is Counsel for the Defence, up against the Attorney General. In the novel there are frequent references to the genre. Inspector Moltram reads detective stories, while the accused is a fan and finds himself the central player in one, being discovered in a locked room with the corpse of his putative father-in-law: “It was like his own favourite novels turned to a nightmare”.
With a cover proclaiming “Because old people don’t just solve murders”, Samantha Dowling’s Too Old For This (Michael Joseph, 2025, £16.99), my novel of the month, focuses on Lottie Jones, elderly, lonely and very painfully arthritic. She has got away with killing a number of people when younger, in large part by disposing of the bodies and by not answering questions when questioned by the police. All square, but now Plum Dixon, an investigative journalist (a more pleasant version of the dour version in Heather Critchlow’s novel later in this review) hoves into sight, only for the threat to be killed, cut up and burnt away. However, a blackmailing policewoman follows. Wry, humorous, and very good on the problems of ageing, and the resulting difficulties, including covering up murders in the contemporary world. The cover comment suggests a comparison with Richard Osman, but this is much better, in pace, characterisation, plot and writing.
Cyanide in the Sun’ and Other Stories of Summertime Crime (British Library Crime Classics, 2025, £10.99) is another of Martin Edwards’ fine anthologies, following his earlier summertime outing in Resorting to Murder. Contains 18 short stories, beginning with Guy Cullingford’s “Kill and Cure” (1958) amidst the murderous world of genteelly poor elderly ladies, and pressing on with Wilfred Fienburgh’s “Day Excursion” (1954), a story of seaside theft written by a predecessor of Jeremy Corbyn. Christopher Bobbett’s “The Secret of the Mountain” (1928) sees a Lake District murderer brought to justice in the absence of evidence. Andrew Garve uses “Unlucky Dip” (1956) to murder a seaside swimmer when witnesses affirm no-one is close to him on the beach, Victor Canning’s “Quarrel at Sea” (1956) sees a Devon sailing holiday prove fatal for a quarrelling brother, and Ethel Lina White’s claustrophobic “The Holiday” (1938) finds a lonely typist trapped in her flat by a fleeing murderer. The fictional town of Blymouth sees a contract killer spread his wings with fatal consequences in Michael Gilbert’s “Even Murderers Take Holidays” (1956). And so on with Anthony Berkeley, Nicholas Bentley, Bernard Farmer, Anthony Gilbert, Shelley Smith, Christianna Brand, who is the author of the impressive title story, John Bingham, Will Scott, Michael Innes, Celia Fremlin and Julian Symons. The 1950s proved especially forthcoming in menace.
There is (and this is praise) a 1950s character in Louise Candlish’s A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder (HQ, 2025, £16.99), a “why-done-it?” set in Columbia Mansions, an up-market London block that turns out to be riven by suspicion and scheming, with a well-meaning elderly busybody totally played by a host of modern unpleasants including a prim do-gooder, an influencer, property-profit seekers, “the Women Against Sex for Rent” campaign, and, indeed, just about everyone. Britain is crooked as well as broke in this ably-written slow-burn of a novel. Recommended.
Also in London, A.A. Chaudhuri’s The School Gates (Hera, 2025, £9.95) has Surbiton as the setting for the outset murder, after the Reception Class parents’ Christmas party, of Lola Martinez, a school mum made unpopular with the complacent yummy mummies by her single status. Probing her past releases a cascade of secrets in the established fashion and thereby provides the opportunity for many plot shifts. The story repeatedly moves between “before” and the police investigation. As so often, the trauma of the past is also at play or rather malign purpose. Some of the dialogue could be sharpened, as with the following between two policemen: “You’d be surprised what ordinary people do when they’ve had a bit too much to drink and there’s existing ill-will between them. Doesn’t take much to set them off, especially if they’re on the hot-headed side.” A novel that is better on the mums than the police.
Matthew Sweet’s Bookish (Quercus, 2025, £20) is adapted from the six-part 2025 television series of that name created by Mark Gatiss. A whimsical account both of postwar London and of the world of bookshops. A kind book with considerable wit. Highly readable. Clever in the best of senses.
Wit and, initially, a well-realised London setting — the offices of Girl’s Together magazine — launch Cat and Mouse (1950; British Library Crime Classics, 2025, £10.99) by the excellent Christianna Brand. This Neo-Gothic work, written with humour, has echoes of Northanger Abbey and of the novels of Ann Radcliffe, though she preferred the Mediterranean for her settings, rather than Brand’s departure for Wales. There the magazine’s agony columnist, the very ably realised “Katinka” Jones, at a loose end on a visit, looks up Amista, a correspondent, only to find mystery and possibly a shadow of Jane Eyre. A degree of intended claustrophobia in a plot that twists to the very end.
Preferences of course vary and I far preferred, in the same series, Nina Bawden’s The Odd Flamingo (1954; 2025, £10.99). In some respects it is bleak, as a story, that begins with a pregnant 16 year old disappearing after naming a local headmaster as the father, becomes one of blackmail, murder and drugs, all set in a London of poverty, misery, poor parenting, grime and bad taste, the last focused on the seedy club of the title. Yet, the characterisation, particularly of Will Hunt, a solicitor who is the determined narrator and disillusioned discoverer of this world, but, also, more generally, is superb, while, until the closing rush, the plot works well. The writing is fresh, clear and able. An alternative plot would have had Celia the killer; just as, in the Dickson Carr, it could have been the doctor substituting for his brother whom the narrator had never hitherto met. Part of the fun of the genre is that of working out alternative solutions.
A different, but also far from cosy, account of the 1950s is offered by Fiona Sinclair, the pen name of Fiona Maud Peters (1919-61), in her debut, Scandalize My Name (1960, British Library Crime Classics, 2025, £10.99). Compared by Martin Edwards in the introduction to P.D. James, whose Adam Dalgliesh first appeared two years later, and, like Sinclair’s Inspector Paul Grainger, was a cultured widower, Sinclair’s early death ensured that her reputation is far less. Yet, there are similarities between the two authors, not least in a concern with mental illness and a scepticism about the welfare state:
… these people were all too inclined to drift in unhappy chaos on the tepid waters of the Welfare State … Protected as they must be by the laws that guard the freedom of all individuals, they were free to do harm to others.
There are many shadows from World War Two, but also “the mushroom-shaped cloud … above all human lives”. The characterisation is impressive, family relationships handled very well, the plot impressive, and the writing very good, as in “a rather lovely country house that still wore an air of surprise at finding itself a school”. An excellent story that shares with The Judas Window, although very differently, the hijack device of the crime within a crime.
Not (yet?) in the series, John Rhode’s Death on the Board (Collins, 1937) begins in Beckenham in the 1930s with the oft-felt vivid memories of a veteran about a German bombardment in 1918, but, in this case, these are provoked by an explosion that destroys The Privetts, the residence of Sir Andrew Wiggenham, killing him. The familiar cast of Dr Priestley, Superintendent Hanslet, Inspector Waghorn and Harold Merefield. Possible suspects are speedily set aside as in ‘“I am certain that suburban chairwomen are very rarely anarchists.”’ Wiggenham’s brother suspects ‘“criminally-minded people who refuse to see the virtues of capitalism”’. In practice, the villain is no surprise, but a very good read even if the end is overly melodramatic.
Also by Rhode, Death at the Helm (Collins, 1941) reads well again after a first read several years ago. The finding of the corpses of a man and a woman on a motor-cruiser on the Sussex coast initially leads to the conclusion that a suicide pact has been decisive, but the usual crew of Priestley, friends and (thanks to the good Doctor) police discern and dissect the relevant plot. Sir Clarence Farningham, Vice-Chairman of the Purity Society, provides humbug and Hampden’s Gin Blimp is not a success. A very interesting legal twist at the close.
A Disraeli specialist, Thom Braun offers a chunky mystery involving the young Charles Dickens in his Hungerford Stairs (Matador, 2023, £14.99). In my review of his Hogarth novel, I have already noted Braun’s skill in meshing fact and fiction, and he does so not only for Dickens in a vividly-realised 1824 but also for London’s criminal milieu of the period, not least the Cole Green robbery. Dickens is entrapped by the criminal Mr Magnus, who is more sinister than his equivalents in the novels, only for Magnus to be confronted by the more ambivalent Mr Hesketh. Dickens emerges as “clearly a boy with potential”, and the story sees the family redeemed from the Marchalsea.
Trevor Wood’s The Inside Man (Quercus, 2025, £20) is the first I have read by this prolific author, and it whets my appetite for more, not least as set in Newcastle where I lived from 1983 to 1996. The protagonist, DCI Jack Parker, is facing three plot lines, his own early-stage dementia, with the resulting struggles within his family over his commitment to suicide, his private quest to discover who was responsible for the hit-and-run death of a colleague who was a friend as well as linked to a crime family, and the disappearance of a young woman and her child who are being bullied by her toxic ex-husband. The interacting narratives are handled well, in a skilful account of police simultaneity that is further enlivened by the rivalry of Parker’s two subordinates who are lovers but also highly competitive. Far from being “the plot of a schlocky paperback thriller”, to cite a phrase given the protagonist. Instead, “following the first rule of the ABC of investigations, I wasn’t going to assume anything”. Brilliant plot with lots of surprises. Strong sense of true justice as opposed to the law. Works very well. It is also well worth reading, in this series, the debut, The Man on the Street (2019, 2020 pb., Quercus, £10.99), and The Silent Killer (2024, 2025 pb., Quercus, £9.99).
M.J. Lee’s What the Dark Whispers (Canelo, 2025, £9.99) is the latest of his Mancunian-set D.I. Ridpath stories. Ridpath teases out apparently separate violent deaths in order to find a homicidal revenge plot, as well as incompetence and complacency in the police force. Well-written and ably plotted, this story gathers pace to become an impressive and engrossing tale.
Richard Coles’ Canon Clement Mysteries continue with
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2025, £22.00). Set in 1990, this finds Champton House the location for costume drama, only for a masque supposedly staged in 1603 to lead to murder. There is richly comic writing, notably around the Hollywood star, but also more generally: “Neil remembered one of the droller elders in the Moravian Brethren Church remarking once that sex was frowned upon in the Church lest it encourage dancing” or “He seems to share his bed more readily than his postcode”. There are clerical in-jokes, as in “there was nothing like an early-Church controversy to smother a passionate surge of any kind”. The conclusion to this first-rate book looks to Christie in the hands of Elizabeth Taylor.
A very different clerical note was struck by the prolific George Birmingham (1865-1950) in Wild Justice (Methuen, 1930), a work that is unlikely to be republished due to its comments about the Irish which arose from Birmingham’s experience and the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War. In many respects, a conventional Golden Age locked house story, one underlined by mention of a detective story The Pickled Corpse, the Mellanby murder becomes a courtroom drama that ends with a dramatic denouement. I had spotted the murderer, though not the why. Impressive as an indication of the extent to which the literature of the period was far from escapist.
A contemporary cleric, Victor Whitechurch (1868-1933), lacked the Church of Ireland link and also wrote many works that do not engage with detection, but was noted for his vegetarian railway detective, Thorpe Hazell, as well as for other detection works. The Dean and Jecinora (T. Fisher Unwin, 1926) is written with wit and without menace. There is much fun at the expense of snobbery — “‘A chemist!’ said Pegg. ‘He looked much more like a gentleman’.” Even a lunch at the Athenaeum in which the Prime Minister decides a clerical appointment, features. Set in ‘Frattenbury” (Chichester), the Dean of which has a swindler for a brother and a new neighbour who is a kimono-wearing chemist who hires the Dean’s lively niece as a chauffeur. And we are off on a jolly tale that ends in an engagement. In contrast, his Shot on the Downs (T. Fisher Unwin, 1927) is a conventional murder story although, as the foreword notes, intended solely to use “ordinary police methods” and to avoid “setting up a dummy”. Whitechurch complains that:
It is rather the fashion in popular crime stories of today to set forth the amateur sleuth with his astuteness as the successful rival of a more or less blundering police force … it is far easier for the writer of detective fiction to take on his one particular “investigator” … than to attempt to portray the complicated machinery of a force which depends upon corporate action… make far less exciting reading than the often bizarre deductions and consequent hair-raising episodes so usually characteristic of the brilliant genius.
At the outset, a walker hears a shot, finds a (murdered) corpse, and steals money from it. Pipe tobacco ash plays a role, as do the skills of a poacher. The Chief Constable, naturally, is a Colonel, an always-smoking genius who reads Marcus Aurelius. A first-rate, well-paced plot. Impressive.
So also, from the excellent Cyril Hare, for When the Wind Blows (1949), which was published in 1987 as The Wind Blows Death (Faber, £2.95). This is a Francis Pettigrew story and written with great wit and style, as well as acute observation about people and society. The cast is excellent, not least MacWilliam, the sage Chief Constable, the pompous Mrs Basset, a leader of society in Markhampton, the lascivious Ventry, and the limited Inspector Trimble. The murder of a key player at a concert leads off a scrutiny of personalities and possibilities.
There are many reflections of life in the period that are of considerable interest, as when the Chief Constable brings Pettigrew some whisky remarking:
I have never been able to understand why, in these days of shortages and rationing, it should be considered perfectly proper for guests to bring with them morsels of tea and sugar and disgusting little packets of margarine … while it is taken for granted that they should be applied at libitum with substances far more precious.
There are also comments on people, as in “The invariable characteristic of practical men is never to look below the surface of anything.”
“It was the last place you expected to find violent crime — unless it featured in the pages of the cosier kind of murder mystery.” That, however, is not on offer in Kate Ellis’ Deadly Remains (Constable, 2025, £22), in which DI Wesley Peterson pursues the murderer of the ghostwriter Barry Brown who was investigating the Dartmoor crash of a Lysander in 1943. Solid writing and a clearly-proceeding narrative. Mixes back and forth, to include jewel robbery by the Royal Family (in reality robbers masked accordingly), wartime romance, diaries, and SOE espionage, American soldiers, cyanide, the drug trade, too much rolling of the eyes (twice on pp. 76-7), a tin-ear for police dialogue, and a style that could be improved. Too much of this sort of writing:
Intrigued as Wesley was by the call from the Met, he needed to see what Neil had found. Neil wasn’t usually fazed by human remains turning up during a dig, but he’d sounded as though this particular discovery had disturbed him…
Michael looked devastated, as though she’d just delivered a physical blow.
Inheritance and family today are key to the story. A pity about the writing, as it is a very good story with an impressive plot.
The writing could also be sharpened in Rachel McLean’s The Poole Harbour Murders (Hera, 2025, £9.99) which is launched by the disappearance of a woman in 1973 and the discovery of a body in Poole Harbour by a dredger in 2025. Is a 1973 disappearance or another in 2024 at issue? The discussion of police relationships is somewhat familiar, even dull, but the shake of identities works well, and there are impressive twists.
There is too much padding and some poor writing in J.D. Kirk’s A Rock and a Hard Place (Canelo, 2025, £16.99), which is a shame because the account of the discovery of the body of ex-pop star Johnny Freestone in a Scottish cave works well, and I was amused by Taggart as the name for the dog. “Anyone can type a suicide note” is the most memorable line. Douglas Skelton’s The Other Side of Fear (Polygon, 2025, £9.99) takes the journalist Rebecca Connolly to investigate some more Scottish noir. I generally like Skelton, but this one simply did not work. The plot and writing were somewhat formulaic with stock villains and I gave up. I also did not take to Heather Critchlow’s Unknown (Canelo, 2025, £9.99) in large part because the Cal Lovett stories with the true crime podcaster and the reiterated references to Lovett’s dead sister fail to engage me and there is a somewhat formulaic character to the stories.
Neil Broadfoot’s Exit Wounds (Constable, 2025, £21.99) takes forward the Connor Fraser series with a dramatic and atmospheric account of Belfast, now amidst the violent legacy of the Troubles. An investigation of a death brings to the fore an aftermath of atrocities in which the British military played an ambivalent role. Connor’s search for meaning becomes a bloody, bone shattering, saga, with goons manipulated by men in moustaches and the army little better than the IRA. Guns aplenty in a dysfunctional Britain, with drug smuggling the only alternative game in town. Gritty, well-written and well-paced. The drug trade plays a role in many current novels.
In contrast, it is indicative of the writing and plot complexity of Max Connor’s revenge-thriller No Mercy (HQ, 2025, £9.99) that one of the characters praises the writing of Danielle Steele. A book to dodge.
Ireland is the setting for Amanda Cassidy’s The Stranger Inside in which Ciara Duffy, a troubled midwife, fearing a stranger in the house, awakes to find her husband beside her in bed, stabbed to death. Arrested and charged with murder, her policeman father is shot dead soon after, an apparent suicide. Concern about her ill daughter leads her to try to break out from prison, in part in a search for the killer. A searching account from within of the breakdown of security, the maelstrom of being accused, the drab hazard of prison, the terrors of going on the run. The past swirls in, from the seizure of a child to possible medical malpractice, affairs, unknown family, and, indeed, so much that “It doesn’t add up”, only for there to be an impressive resolution at the end of a thrilling tale.
I did not like Jess Ryder’s The Villa, but found her The Island Escape (Penguin, 2025, £9.99) far better. A double narrative in the Cyclades, for Estelle in 1984-5 and Juno, her daughter, now, the latter trying to find her long-lost Greek father, only to discover that paradise is an illusion. Well-written, and, when the pace slackens, there is the discovery of a body, and three possible candidates all of whom have disappeared. Very good on Greek life and family dynamics, and the disruption caused by carefree British tourists, especially young women seeking love, fun and respect, and finding a somewhat different offering. Despite the setting and a misguided remark in the publicity sheet, “If Mamma Mia! had murder”, this is not the Mamma Mia world. Instead a far more mature approach, and a good plot that is ably delivered. The theme, of a daughter returning to a Mediterranean holiday site of which her mother has dire memories, returns (albeit for Corsica not Greece) in Sarah Clarke’s Someone in the Water (HQ, 2025, £9.99).
Shylashri Shankar’s Blood Caste (Canelo, 2025, £18.99) is an adept version of the Anglo-Indian detective story, one set in Hyderabad (an independent princely state with a British Resident) in 1895, with echoes of Jack the Ripper, whom the Indian Chief Inspector had killed in London, and questions of ethnic, social, institutional and political tension in a “society that set such store by appearances”. An effective novel that is continually interesting.
Paranoia Blues. Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon (Down and Out Books, 2022) is an excellent volume edited by Josh Pachter, following similar volumes for Joni Mitchell (2020), Jimmy Buffett (2021), Billy Joel (2021) and the Marx Brothers (2021). Each story is matched to a song. Hardboiled America is the setting, and the themes are grim but also well-realised. The writing is spare and aphoristic, violence is to the fore, and it would be good if several of the novelists mentioned this month could match the quality of the writing here. There is no space to review all 19 of the stories, but they are impressive, kicking off with Vietnam echoes and killing in the New York subway system in Gabriel Valjan’s “The Sounds of Silence”. R.J. Koreto’s “April Come She Will” addresses fraud and blackmail, with some marvellous lines: “For men, the possibility of sex is actually better than sex itself…. August, the end of summer, a time when relationships die”. Robert Edward Eckels had stopped writing in 1982 but resumed at 90 to write “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine”, an account of office theft, poor management, and measured retribution. Frank Zafiro’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” deals with the travails of an elderly mob enforcer: an instructive perspective. Anna Scotti’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a brilliant and humane account of hardship, care, and a concealed suicide. Tom Mead’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” takes Civil Rights into violent crime in New York including a spring-loaded leather strap on the protagonist’s wrist. Excellent book.
American rural/small-town dystopia is a genre much in evidence, and Morgan Greene’s The Blood We Share (Canelo, 2025, £9.99) is a powerful addition, with Devils Lake, South Dakota a setting for evil cops and a vicious messianic cult, and Jacob Taylor setting off the tale when he finds a blood-soaked young woman on the road. She spends the night, they have sex, and, soon after, he is falsely arrested for her rape and for the murder of two men at the mysterious Farm. We are launched into a multiple-perspective morality tale about families, redemption, violence, pain, and a plot that twists skilfully to become a page-turner as it moves toward surprising resolutions. A success. For cults, there is also recently Mariette Lindstein’s Children of Fog Island (HQ, 2025, £9.99), Swedish-noir I have not read as I try not to tackle crimes against children.
A very different cult is at play in Adrien Trarieux’s The Bogota Delusion (2023, £8.99, Kindle E-book £1.99), the best (with that by Tom Braun, which is very different in content and tone) of the self-published books I have read. A very grim view of life in Bogota, of the material culture, the links between police, crime and politics, the incessant nature of violence, and the prevalence of plotting. A triumph.
Sarah Ward’s Quiet Bones (Canelo, 2025, £9.99) has an American college setting with a missing student and a discarded dead baby wrapped in a swan’s wing launching a tale of small-town deceit and corruption with hackneyed themes, notably “a group of privileged white males acting out some half-baked fantasy of ancient initiation rites”. The writing is overly bland (of the “Carla hastened to reassure her she wasn’t injured” type), pedestrian (of the “Carla wondered where the white-hot heat of anger came from”) and careless (sighted for sighed; disinterested for uninterested etc), but will please those who seek an undemanding read.
Jonathan Ames’ Karma Doll (Pushkin, 2025, £9.99), the third of his Happy Doll series has a Don Quixote turned Buddhist retribution dealer of the California noir goes to Mexico plot, with a clutch of devious characters such as “a mid-thirties fellow named Nick, a weight lifter who looked like he was on steroids…. He had all the personality of one of his tumorous biceps: he hardly spoke and wouldn’t make eye contact.” Easy to identify with Doll as he likes baths. The descriptions are dismissive — “the architect had screwed up, and it’s less like an office and more like a gangplank with aspirations to be a walk-in closet”, while the writing is on point as in the description of the narrator’s dog:
George and his sparring partner, having gained each other’s respect, would then, thoughtfully, and with a lot of decorum and fascination, sniff each other’s rectum, usually followed by some gentle oral sex. Humans can learn a lot from dogs, and certainly the French have.
The language can be whimsical, but the violence is frequent and usually deadly, although, like so many writers, Ames exaggerates the damage the human head can take, and seriously so. Humour is more overt in Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs (Penguin, 2025, £16.99), which is a thriller rather than a detective novel. It looks good, but I have only dipped into it.
The publication in translation of excellent Japanese works continues apace, with Seichō Matsumoto’s A Quiet Place (1971, Bitter Lemon, 2016, Penguin, 2025, £9.99). The Sunday Times’s absurd description of Matsumoto (1909-92) as “Japan’s Agatha Christie” is quoted on the cover, when, in practice, the psychological slow-burn pressure is more similar to a Simenon. The story is told from the perspective of Tsuneo Asai, a section chief in the Staple Food Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, off on a trip inspecting canning facilities and ham-processing plants, only to hear that his wife, Eiko, has died in a Tokyo shop after being overcome while walking. Investigating, he discovers his wife’s double life with its sexual theme, there is murder and then concealment. Brilliant on the Japanese bureaucratic mindset, on a fragile personality [us all] in dissolution under pressure, on the sudden spurts of violence that lead to murder, and on the long aftermath of fear for all bar the professional killer. Excellent, and only 231 pages, even if somewhat slow in places. Again, recommended.
The steady progress of Garry Disher in his “Hall Challis Investigations’”through the grime and deceit of the Mornington Peninsula continues with Snapshot (Viper, 2025, £9.99). A sex party recorded on a mobile phone becomes an apparent cause of murder and this spins out to encompass police rifts, professional and personal, contract killing, and asylum-seeker detention. Twists and turns to the very end in a well-written tale in which the inequalities and falsehoods of Australian society are opened for scrutiny. In the police, “the budget destroys resources, the paperwork destroys time, and the jargon destroys reason”.
The highly successful “Warsaw Quartet” series continues with Douglas Jackson’s Blood Vengeance (Canelo, 2025, £18.99). This is weaker than the first two because of the move of setting from Warsaw to Britain in December 1943, where a Polish Resistance fighter has been murdered on a SOE refresher course in Arisaig. In an improbable plot, Jan Kalisz is flown to Britain at Churchill’s behest in order to investigate. The plot rapidly escalates: “‘he did not shoot himself, and he was not killed by the pistol in the photograph’.” It is all about “links”. French and Polish sub-settings, the French that of Resistance loyalty and disloyalty, the latter linked to Arisaig. Who is the traitor within? and why? Very few mistakes. For example Canadians were not a year on garrison duty in Iceland before coming over to England in 1940, while the ‘45 is misrepresented, and it is enormity not enormousness. I look forward to the next, presumably on the Warsaw Rising.
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