Penguin| 2 April 2026| 524 pages| e-book| Review copy|5*
Description from Amazon
On a cold night in a remote Irish village, a girl goes missing.
Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.
In a place like this, her death isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.
I’ve read the first two in Tana French’s Cal Hooper series, The Searcher and The Hunter, so I was really keen to read her third, The Keeper. They are all excellent books.
This one completes the Cal Hooper trilogy continuing the story of retired Chicago police officer Cal, his fiancée Lena, teenager Trey Reddy, who is now sixteen, and the rest of the people living in Ardnakelty, a fictional, remote village in Western Ireland. Like the first two books The Keeper begins slowly, but I like the slow build up to the mystery, and I love Tana French’s beautiful descriptions of the Irish rural landscape and her characterisation. I really felt that over the course of the trilogy I have got to know the characters – they come over as real people and I felt for all of them as this story developed.
It’s focused on the death of Rachel Holohan, was it murder or suicide, as her fiancé’s father would have us believe? I’m not going to write in any more detail about the plot other than to say that from the slow start the pace picks up, the tension rises and the twists and turns all make this an impressive and convincing murder mystery. I loved it and only hope that Tana French will write more books about Cal and the others as I’d love to know what happens next.
Tana French has won several awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction.
As well as the Cal Hooper trilogy, she has written a standalone novel, The Wych Elm and six books that form The Dublin Squad series:
In the Woods (2006) The Likeness (2008) Faithful Place (2010) BrokenHarbour (2012) The SecretPlace (2014) The Trespasser (2016
Many thanks to the author and Penguin for a review copy via NetGalley.
This week Simon and Karen are hosting the 1961 Club. To join in all you have to do is read and review any book published in 1961 in whatever format, language, place.
I originally thought I’d like to read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irvine Stone for this event but I ran out of time. But I did find time to read Call for the Dead by John Le Carré, which has been buried deep in my Kindle. I’d bought it back in 2017 and read a few pages, meaning to get back to it before long. But of course I didn’t – until now. It’s a novella of 162 pages.
It’s the first of his many books to feature the tenacious, unassuming and singular George Smiley. Previously I’ve read the third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and the fifth and sixth books Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), which I read before I had a blog, and The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which I think is brilliant.
Description:
An apparent suicide. A deepening mystery. A letter from a dead man…
Secret agent George Smgeorge Smiley iley is in trouble. A Foreign Office civil servant, Samuel Fennan, has killed himself, and Smiley realizes that Intelligence head Maston is going to set him up to take the blame. Beginning his own investigation, Smiley is shocked to receive an urgent letter from the dead man, and slowly uncovers a network of deceit and betrayal
This is a spy thriller but George Smiley is not James Bond.
Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.
He married the beautiful Lady Ann Sercomb, but they divorced after two years, when she left him for a Cuban motor racing driver. He was ‘without parents, school, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty ordinary’.
The first chapter gives a brief history of George Smiley, describing him as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. The only part of himself that survived was his profession, that of an intelligence officer in the Secret Service. Having read some of the later books it was interesting to find out about his background, his academic life and early career and failed marriage.
He had got to that stage in his career,with the appearance of younger men, when he realised he had entered middle age without ever being young. He had carried out his job during the second world war well, but after that amongst the smart young men he felt old-fashioned and he became more ‘hunched and frog-like’ and had acquired the nickname of ‘Mole’. He was considered too old to go abroad and that was when he was transferred Cambridge Circus in London – the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6).
John Le Carré began writing the book whilst working for MI6. He initially called it A Clear Case of Suicide and there are clear elements of crime fiction at first, but then it develops into more of a spy thriller. Samuel Fennan, who had access to sensitive information had apparently committed suicide. Feenan had been found dead, leaving a letter saying that Smiley had cast doubts on his loyalty, that his career in the Foreign Office was over and that he was the victim of paid informers. He thought the interview was particularly a friendly one and that he’d told Fennan not to worry, that he could see no reason why they should bother him further.
Smiley can’t accept this was suicide, thinking Fennan had been murdered. He then resigned from the service when Maston ordered him to drop the investigation, but with the help of a CID man, Mendel, and Peter Guillam, Smiley’s assistant, Smiley unravels the truth behind Fennan’s death. At the end of the book, Smiley wrote a long report summarising the case, listing the facts and explaining his thoughts in much the same way as Hercule Poirot does in the Agatha Christie books.
I like Le Carré’s writing style, which is clear and straight forward, although Call for the Dead has quite a complicated plot. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
I’ve previously read and reviewed read these four books, that were also published in 1961:
The Girl in the Cellar by Patricia Wentworth, a Miss Silver Mystery. It begins well as the main character finds herself in the dark in a cellar, not knowing who she is or how she got there. Overall, I thought the book was odd and not very convincing. There are too many coincidences, improbabilities, and loose ends.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, was first published in The New Yorker magazine on 14th October 1961. It is perhaps Muriel Spark’s most famous novel about the ‘Brodie set’. But which one of them causes her downfall and her loss of pride and self-absorption? What really impresses me about this book is the writing, so compact, so perceptive and so in control of the shifts in time backwards and forwards. It’s a joy to read.
The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie. Neither Hercule Poirot, nor Miss Marple feature in this novel and Mrs Ariadne Oliver has only a small part. Detective Inspector Lejeune is in charge of the investigation into the murder of Father Gorman who was killed one night on his way home. The Pale Horse is an old house which was formerly an inn in the village and is now the home of three weird women, thought by the locals to be witches. It’s also the name of a sinister organisation that arranges murders based on black magic. The book is a study of evil, a fascinating book conveying a feeling of real menace.
A Severed Headby Iris Murdoch. Reading this I felt I was looking into a different world and time. It’s not comfortable reading, but it is farcical and entertaining. It’s a tightly-structured novel, with just a few characters, narrated by Martin, who is shocked when his wife announces that she wants a divorce because she is deeply in love with Palmer, her analyst. This sets in motion a sequence of events in which Martin’s weakness and need are clearly evident.
The Complete Parker Pyne Private Eye by Agatha Christie is a collection of all 14 Parker Pyne short stories. It’s also the book that was my Classics Club spin read to be read by 29th March. I did finish reading it before that date but I’ve only just got round to writing about it today! I’ve been very slow about writing reviews this year as ‘real life’ has had to take precedence over writing – but not over reading!
Agatha Christie wrote in her Foreword to this book that age enjoyed writing these stories. The idea for them came when she was having lunch at a Corner House – Lyons Corner Houses were British tea shops and restaurants operating from 1909 to 1977 – when she overheard a conversation on statistics at a table behind her. She turned her head and saw ‘a bald head, glasses and a beaming smile’. And so Mr Parker Pyne came into her mind and she used him for a new series of short stories that she was considering writing.
She wrote many short stories and although I prefer her full length books I also enjoy her short stories. Some of these in this collection are very short and the whole book can be read quickly. I think they were all published in various magazines before they were collected in this book. And I see that some of them are available as individual stories in Kindle e-books.
They all follow the same theme – Mr Parker Pyne places an advert in The Times every morning:
A former civil servant he had set himself up as a private investigator. He describes himself as ‘a heart specialist’. He’s rather fat and unconventional, kind-hearted yet businesslike. He doesn’t work alone but employs his secretary, a Miss Lemon (was she also Hercule Poirot’s secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon in later books?), novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver, who appeared in The Case of The Discontented Soldier, a handsome lounge lizard, Claude Luttrell and disguise artist Madeleine de Sara.
Mrs Ariadne Oliver is a writer of detective fiction who also assists Poirot. I think Agatha Christie enjoyed writing about her, using her to express her own thoughts about writing, about Poirot and playwrights adapting her plays. In this story she is described as the author of forty-six successful works of fiction, all best sellers both in England and America and translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian.
Some of the stories are about people who responded to the adverts bur some are about people he met whilst travelling in places abroad, told in The Gate of Baghdad, The House at Shiraz (then in Persia, now Iran) The Pearl of Price (Petra in Jordan), Death on the Nile – not the same as the novel, The Oracle at Delphi (Greece) and Problem at Pollensa Bay (in Majorca). In these stories he is on holiday and reluctant to accept cases, but acts as an adviser or an investigator. I think these stories are the most interesting ones in this collection because she draws on her own experience of life in the Middle East, which she wrote under her married name Agatha Christie Mallowan, in Come Tell Me How I Live: an Archaeological Memoir, in answer to her friends’ questions about what life was like when she accompanied Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s.
Overall, I think some of these stories are rather slight, but they are entertaining and I do like Parker Pyne, himself.
It’s March and Reading Wales ’26, hosted by Booker Talk and Kathryn Eastman from Nut Press is back for its ninth year to celebrate literature from this Celtic nation.
Roald Dahl’s parents were Norwegian but he was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales in 1916. He is well known for his children’s books. He was a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace, a military pilot who had officially shot down a minimum number of enemy aircraft, typically five or more, during aerial combat.
He also wrote numerous short stories for adults. There are several collections of these. I have just one – Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, which is made up of two collections: Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. I first came across Roald Dahl back in 1979 when I used to enjoy watching these tales in the TV series, Tales of the Unexpected. There are 25 short stories in total in this book, some of them are very short, but I prefer the longer stories. As the title suggests these short stories all end with an unexpected twist, some are more predictable than others, but others did take me by surprise with a sting in the tail. I read some of them last year when I was taking part in Short Story September and wrote about a couple of the stories. You can read what I thought of them here.
I’ve revisited the book and read some more for Reading Wales ’26.
When I sat down to write about these two stories I wasn’t sure how much of the plots to describe without telling the whole story or giving away spoilers. So, I’ve been brief in describing the first story and a bit more detailed in describing the second one.
Lamb to the Slaughter was first published in Harper’s Magazine in September 1953. It is an ironic story with elements of black humour in which a horrific event is described in a comic manner.
It’s about a couple – Mary and Patrick Maloney. She’s a housewife, six months pregnant and he’s a senior policeman. The story begins as Mary is sitting peacefully sewing, looking forward to Patrick’s return home from work. It was a blissful time of day for her. But that all changed when he came in. She put down her sewing, and kissed him. He was tired and didn’t want to go out for a meal and shocked her when he said he had something to tell her. She heard him in silence watching him with a kind of dazed horror. Mary’s peace of mind was shattered and their evening ended in horror and murder.
In this story the title is a good clue. There is a fair bit of foreshadowing too, which gives you a good indication of what’s coming next and builds up suspense. And I did predict some of what would happen, but not all of it. The surprise ending gives the story an ironic and macabre feeling. I enjoyed the black humour.
Man from the South, first published in the American magazine, Collier’s in 1948, is also a macabre story, but less easy to predict and more shocking and gruesome. The suspense and tension rapidly rise in the 11 pages of this story. The title didn’t give me any hints and neither did the opening paragraphs. It begins in the early evening when the unnamed narrator is sitting by a swimming pool, enjoying the evening sun in Jamaica. Then an immaculately dressed older man from South America joins him followed by a young American sailor and an English girl.
During their conversation the sailor comments that his cigarette lighter never fails and the old man says that if the sailor can successfully light his lighter ten times in a row, he will win the man’s Cadillac, but if he fails, the man will chop off the sailor’s little finger. The American is taken aback, but eventually agrees and they all go up to his room, despite the English girl’s statement that it is a stupid ridiculous bet. What really made the tension worse is that the old man ties the boy’s hand to the table and stands there ready to chop the moment the lighter fails. This is all described in great detail and I read on with increasing dread. What would happen?
The narrator didn’t like the bet either – he didn’t know what to make of it all. Neither did I. But I read on as the pace of the story slowed as the boy counted out loud the number of times he successfully lit his lighter. How long would this go on? Would he lose his finger? I found it really shocking. He’d successfully lit it eleven times before the dramatic ending.
Both stories are written in a plain straightforward style, the characters are described in precise detail, and there are satisfying shock endings and twists in the tales, that didn’t leave me wanting to know more or thinking ‘so what’. Of the two I preferred Man from the South.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!
The options this month are Pi Day, March Madness or Green Covers. I know very little about the first two options and although earlier this month I posted a Top Ten Tuesday post on books with green covers (in honour of St. Patrick’s Day , here are five more books with green covers, all crime fiction novels that I’ve read. The descriptions in italics are taken either from Amazon UK or from Goodreads.
This is a fictional autobiography by Georges Simenon writing as Maigret, beginning in 1927 or 1928 when Maigret and Simenon, calling himself Georges Sim, first ‘met’. Maigret looks back to his first ‘meeting’ with Sim. He fills in some of the background of his early life and talks about his father and how he first met his wife, Louise. Simenon had written 34 Maigret novels before this one and Maigret took this opportunity to correct some of Simenon’s inaccuracies.
Simenon drops facts and information piecemeal in his Maigret books and one thing I particularly like in Maigret’s Memoirs is that it is all about Maigret, but I did miss not having a mystery to solve.
Set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California, based on Santa Barbara, where Grafton has a home in the suburb of Montecito, this is the first book in the alphabet- titled series of books featuring Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator. Laurence Fife, a prominent divorce attorney with a reputation for single-minded ruthlessness on behalf of his clients, is murdered. His wife, Nikki was convicted of his murder. On her release eight years later, she hires Kinsey to find out who had really killed him.
It’s a fast-paced book, easy to read and with no gory details.
For John Rebus, forty years may have passed, but the death of beautiful, promiscuous Maria Turquand still preys on his mind. Murdered in her hotel room on the night a famous rock star and his entourage were staying there, Maria’s killer has never been found.
Meanwhile, the dark heart of Edinburgh remains up for grabs. A young pretender, Darryl Christie, may have staked his claim, but a vicious attack leaves him weakened and vulnerable, and an inquiry into a major money laundering scheme threatens his position. Has old-time crime boss Big Ger Cafferty really given up the ghost, or is he biding his time until Edinburgh is once more ripe for the picking?
In a tale of twisted power, deep-rooted corruption and bitter rivalries, Rather Be the Devil showcases Rankin and Rebus at their unstoppable best.
A dog howled by night in the quiet of Milpas Drive, and drove Arthur Cartright crazy with terror. He begged lawyer Perry Mason to bring a warrant against its owner, who, he said, had taught the dog to howl in order to drive him mad. According to superstition the howling meant a death in the neighbourhood, and Cartright appeared to believe it.
But Mason believed that a deeper fear than superstition was impelling his client and when both the dog and its owner were killed he took up the challenge and set himself to find the murderer.
This begins with the party given by Mrs Drake for teenagers. One of the guests, Joyce Reynolds, a boastful thirteen-year old, who likes to draw attention to herself, announces that once she’d witnessed a murder. It seems nobody believed her and yet later on she is found dead, drowned in the tub used for the bobbing for apples game – someone had believed her and had killed her. Mrs Ariadne Oliver was at the party and she asks Poirot to help in finding the murderer.
The next link up will be on April 4, 2025 when the theme will be: Easter OR Pastel Covers
March is Reading Wales Month, hosted by Booker Talk. I have several books I intended to read for this event, but the first book I read has meant that I’ve only read a few of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected (I’m hoping to write about them in the next few days). But first here is a book by Ruth Jones.
Transworld Digital| 2022| e-book| 502 pages| I bought it| 5*
Last year I read By Your Side by Ruth Jones because I loved the TV series Gavin and Stacey which Ruth Jones co-wrote with James Corden. I loved it. So when I saw Love Untold I knew I had to read it. And I loved it too. In fact I think this is one of the best books I’ve read this year so far.
Description from Amazon:
Grace is about to turn ninety and she doesn’t want parties or presents or fuss. She just wants a quiet celebration: her daily swim in the sea and a cup of tea with granddaughter Elin and great-granddaughter Beca. More than anything, she wants to heal the family rift that’s been breaking her heart for decades.
And to do that she must find her daughter, Alys – the only person who can help to put things right.But thirty years is a long time.And many words have been left unsaid. So is it too late now to heal the pain of the past?
This is a story about mothers and daughters: the love inherent in that bond and the heartache that miscommunication can bring. More than anything, it’s about the importance of being true to oneself. Meet Grace, Alys, Elin and Beca – a family you’ll come to know, and to love.
Once I started reading I just didn’t want to put this book down. It is so very readable, Ruth Jones is a great storyteller and I read it quickly despite it being 502 pages long. It is perfectly paced, alternating between each of the four women and showing their love for each other, as they each find their own way through life. They are all so well defined that there is never any doubt about who is who and where they fit into the story.
Theirs is a story of mother/daughter relationships, their ups and downs. Grace, a feisty independent lady almost ninety, who swims in the sea daily and enjoys life to the full is adamant, she doesn’t want a surprise party to celebrate her birthday; Elin, super organised and efficient, her granddaughter and a headteacher, is just as determined to give her one; Becca, Elin’s daughter is struggling at school and is sure is going to fail her exams much to her mother’s disappointment. Meanwhile, Alys, Grace’s daughter is estranged from the family, blaming Grace for what has gone wrong with her life.
It’s funny, both heartwarming, and at times a heart-breaking and emotional story, full of love. Grace longs to find out where Alys is and for her to come back home. It’s been thirty years since she last saw her after a breakdown in their relationship. Elin doesn’t want to know Ayls at all and as far as Becca knows, her grandmother died years ago. The history of the family is gradually revealed as the story progresses and I was completely bowled over by the depth of Ruth Jones’ writing. It’s not just about the female characters’ interactions, but also about their relationships with the men and lovers in their lives and the hurt and pain they all suffered. When I’m reading such an engrossing novel I wonder how it could possibly end. And when it arrived in line with the rest of the story the ending was both terribly sad and yet uplifting too.
So, the characters are great, the plot is complicated and complex covering their lives in depth and the setting in Wales is vividly described, bringing the scenes to life.The text is dotted with Welsh words and idioms, bringing back memories of the few words I remember my Taid (grandfather) saying to me when I was a child. As I said at the beginning I loved it and now want to read all of Ruth Jones’ books
Ruth Jones MBE is well known for her television work, most notably BBC One’s multi-award-winning Gavin and Stacey, co-written with James Corden, in which she played Nessa Jenkins. Ruth’s novels have sold over a million copies. Never Greener was a Sunday Times bestseller for fifteen weeks, three weeks at number one, as well as WH Smith Fiction Book of the Year 2018, a nominated Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, and a Zoe Ball Book Club pick. Her second novel, Us Three, and her third novel, Love Untold, were also instant Sunday Times bestsellers. Love Untold was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year, as well as a Richard & Judy Book Club pick. Ruth’s latest novel is By Your Side.
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