Crime Fiction – Page 33

The Pact by Sharon Bolton

Published on May 2, 2021May 2, 2021 by Margaret6 Comments

I was completely gripped by The Pact. It’s a fast-paced novel about a group of five teenagers. It’s summer and they are waiting for their A level exam results. It’s the night before the results come out, the night before all their lives were changed for ever. They were all expecting to get the grades they need to go on to university and to have the brilliant careers they envisaged. But that night was the last carefree night for all of them as it ended in disaster.

For Felix, Talitha, Amber, Daniel and Megan the summer had been glorious – they gone to festivals, lazed around Talitha’s parents’ pool, drinking and enjoying life. That night they decided that Daniel should take the rite of passage the other four had already done that summer. And so it was that they were driving at 80 miles an hour in darkness the wrong way down the M40. The others had had heart-stopping near misses, although Megan had proved to be the coolest of them all. Daniel’s drive was the worst. He drove badly and out of the darkness another car appeared headed towards them and they crashed. A mother and her two young daughters were killed.

What happened next took my breath away. – they drove back to Talitha’s house and after a lengthy discussion when they realised the consequences of what they had done Megan announced that she would take the blame, on the condition that they agree that they owe her a ‘favour’, once she has been released from prison. The ‘favour’ is to do whatever she asks them individually and if they renege she will tell the truth about what had happened that night.

Twenty years later she is released from prison and the time for the calling in her favours begins. The other four have all done well for themselves and hope Megan’s experiences in prison have blotted out her memory about the ‘favours’ they owe her. But Megan is out for revenge and has no mercy for the ‘friends’ who had left her to rot in prison and is determined that they should pay. And so their nightmares begin.

This is a book full of suspense and tension, that just kept building as I read on. It is compelling reading but I didn’t like any of the characters, and I don’t think you are meant to. At times I did feel sorry for Megan – up to a certain point. All the way through I couldn’t understand why Megan had taken the blame. She was from a different background than the others. Their families were privileged, rich and successful, whereas she was from a poor single-parent family. She was a scholarship girl at their private school. She saw it as a token appointment from a posh school declaring its progressive credentials. The others saw her as not really one of them, but she was the head girl and the cleverest of them all. I didn’t think it could be for the power she held over them, surely that wouldn’t compensate for spending time in prison?

It is not my favourite of Sharon Bolton’s books. The ending felt rushed and surprised me and I think it wasn’t really believable, but then I found the plot as a whole difficult to accept. Even so, I just couldn’t stop reading it and managed to suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy it.

My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for my review copy.

Library Books: April 2021

Published on April 26, 2021 by Margaret2 Comments

Our libraries are now open – for limited browsing and the ‘Select and Collect’ service they’ve been running whilst the libraries have been closed. The mobile library is also back and on Tuesday the van came almost to our door, backing down our access drive! We still couldn’t go in the van, but could ask for books. There were no books by the authors I wanted, but there was plenty of crime fiction to choose from – I realise now how limited my crime fiction reading has been as these are all by authors I hadn’t heard of before.

As they are all new-to-me authors I’ve included some details about them – two are American , two are British and three of them are also screenwriters.

From top to bottom they are:

The Promise by Robert Crais, an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel.

Robert Crais is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty novels, sixteen of them featuring private investigator Elvis Cole and his laconic ex-cop partner, Joe Pike. Before writing his first novel, Crais spent several years writing scripts for such major television series as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Miami Vice, Quincy, Baretta, and L.A. Law. He received an Emmy nomination for his work on Hill Street Blues, and one of his standalone novels, Hostage, was made into a movie starring Bruce Willis. His novels have been translated into forty-two languages and are bestsellers around the world. A native of Louisiana, he lives in Los Angeles.

Book description: Loyalty, commitment, the fight against injustice – these are the things that have always driven Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. If they make a promise, they keep it – even if it could get them killed. When Elvis Cole is hired to locate a woman who may have disappeared with a stranger she met online, it seems like an ordinary case – until Elvis learns the missing woman worked for a defence contractor and was being blackmailed to supply explosives components for a person or persons unknown.

The Hunt Club by John Lescroart, the first Wyatt Hunt murder mystery.

John Lescroart is an American author best known for two series of legal and crime thriller novels featuring the characters Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky. In addition to his novels, Lescroart has written several screenplays. He is the author of twenty-nine novels.

Book description: Wyatt Hunt is a self-employed P.I., working low-profile surveillance and insurance fraud cases. Following the death of his fiancée and a twelve-year stint with San Francisco’s Child Protective Services, he isn’t looking for any trouble. So when a federal judge is found murdered in his Pacific Heights home with his mistress, Wyatt figures it’s someone else’s case – until his friend and business associate, attorney Andrea Parisi, becomes the lead suspect in the murder. The case takes a wild turn after Andrea mysteriously disappears, and with the help of his confederation of friends, stringers, and associates – known as the Hunt Club – Wyatt does whatever he must to find Andrea and bring a murderer to justice.

Sacrifice by Max Kinnings, an Ed Mallory thriller.

Max Kinnings is a screenwriter and novelist based in Oxford, England. Max has written feature films, Act of Grace (2012), Alleycats (2016) and The Pagan King (2018) as well as various projects in development including an adaptation of his novel, Baptism. He is the author of four novels, Hitman (2000), The Fixer (2002), Baptism (2012) and Sacrifice (2013). He was the ghost writer of actor/comedian Rik Mayall’s bestselling spoof autobiography, Bigger Than Hitler Better Than Christ (2005) and part of the writing team for the award winning Sony PlayStation game, Little Big Planet 3 (2014). Prior to writing full-time, Max spent twelve years devising advertising and marketing campaigns for music festivals, tours, comedy shows and West End theatre productions. He lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University London where he was recently awarded a PhD.

Book description:

London, Christmas Morning.

09:13am. Disgraced hedge fund manager Graham Poynter hides shamefully in his Belgravia mansion.

10:16am. A masked intruder stands over Poynter and his terrified family, while the last remaining security guard hangs impaled on a railing spike outside the house.

10:38am. Surrounding the scene are police helicopters, special forces teams, and Ed Mallory – blind hostage negotiator – who must stop this twisted retribution.

Her Father’s Daughter by June Tate – other people who borrowed this book said they didn’t know what to make of it – it’s funny book, not funny ha ha but funny peculiar, so I thought I’d see what I think.

June Tate was born in Southampton and spent the early years of her childhood in the Cotswolds. After leaving school she became a hairdresser on cruise ships the Queen Mary and the Mauritania, meeting many Hollywood film stars and VIPs on her travels. She has written 22 books. I found this post on Allison and Busby’s blog about how she constructs an authentic sense of period in her novels.

Book description: On the night before the grand reopening of Club Valletta, former Wren Victoria Teglia can’t help but wonder what her late father would think. She can still clearly remember the day her mother told her that, rather than simply being a courageous hero, her father was also a criminal, and his club was a hotbed of prostitution and illegal gambling.

I’m not sure about any of them – so, I’d love to know what you think – have you read any of these books, if so did you enjoy them? If not, do they tempt you?

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

Published on April 16, 2021 by Margaret4 Comments

I first read Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia in 2012 but never got round to writing about it. It was a good choice to re-read for the 1936 Club as I didn’t remember much about it. It’s a Poirot mystery, but he doesn’t appear until about halfway. As the title tells you it is set in Mesopotamia, the area in the Middle East between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the area of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey).

An archaeologist’s wife is murdered on the shores of the River Tigris in Iraq…

It was clear to Amy Leatheran that something sinister was going on at the Hassanieh dig in Iraq; something associated with the presence of ‘Lovely Louise’, wife of celebrated archaeologist Dr Leidner.

In a few days’ time Hercule Poirot was due to drop in at the excavation site. But with Louise suffering from terrifying hallucinations, and tension within the group becoming almost unbearable, Poirot might just be too late…

Agatha Christie had first visited the Middle East in 1929 travelling on the Orient Express to Istanbul and then on to Damascus and Baghdad. She visited the excavations at Ur and returned there the following spring where she met archaeologist Max Mallowan – by the end of the summer they had decided to marry, which they did on 11 September 1930. So, by 1936 when she wrote Murder in Mesopotamia she had frequently accompanied Max on his archaeological digs and her books set in the Middle East are based on the everyday life that she experienced on a dig and on the people she met.

The murder victim is Louise Leidner, the wife of the leader of the expedition. The novel is narrated by Nurse Amy Leatheran, who had been asked by Dr Leidner to care for Louise, although he is vague about what is wrong with her. It seems she is scared and has nervous terrors. She has fearful visions and the other members of the expedition blame her for the oppressive atmosphere on the dig.

It’s a seemingly impossible murder – she is found in her room, dead from a blow on her head, and suspicion falls on Louise’s first husband who had been sending her threatening letters, or so she had claimed. But no strangers had been seen on or near the expedition house and it is down to Poirot to discover what had actually happened. Fortunately Poirot was in the area, having sorted out a military scandal in Syria (referred to at the beginning of Murder on the Orient Express) and was passing through the expedition site on his way to Baghdad before returning to London.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I think the details of how the murder was committed are rather far-fetched. I was hoping that Agatha Christie had mentioned writing it in her Autobiography, but I couldn’t find any reference to it, although she wrote extensively about her time in the Middle East with Max, and in her fascinating memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live she wrote about how much she loved the country and its people.

The Mirror Dance by Catriona McPherson

Published on April 14, 2021 by Margaret1 Comment

Description:

Something sinister is afoot in the streets of Dundee, when a puppeteer is found murdered behind his striped Punch and Judy stand, as children sit cross-legged drinking ginger beer. At once, Dandy Gilver’s semmingly-innocuous investigation into plagiarism takes a darker turn. The gruesome death seems to be inextricably bound to the gloomy offices of Doig’s Publishers, its secrets hidden in the real stories behind their girls’ magazines The Rosie Cheek and The Freckle.

On meeting a mysterious professor from St Andrews, Dandy and her faithful colleague Alex Osbourne are flung into the worlds of academia, the theatre and publishing. Nothing is quite as it seems, and behind the cheerful facades of puppets and comic books, is a troubled history has begun to repeat itself.

My thoughts:

I’ve read some of the Dandy Gilver mysteries by Catriona McPherson, set in the 1920s and 1930s Scotland. The Mirror Dance is the 15th book. The last one I read was the 6th, a few years ago now, so when I saw it on NetGalley I requested it. I was pleased to find, that although I’d missed so many of the books in the series, it’s easy to read as a standalone.

It begins on an August Bank Holiday weekend in 1937, when Dandy (short for Dandelion Dahlia!), a private detective, receives a phone call from Miss Sandy Bissett, a magazine publisher in Dundee. She asks Dandy to go to Dudhope Park to warn the Punch and Judy man there that he is infringing copyrighted property as he is using two of the magazine’s cartoon characters, Rosie Cheeke and Freckles in his show. So, the next day, Bank Holiday Monday, together with her female staff, Grant, her lady’s maid, Becky her housemaid and Mrs Tilling, her cook, Dandy goes to Dundee to see the puppet show, looking out for the appearance of the magazine characters.

But during the show, the puppet Scaramouche extended his neck upwards, unfolding from pleats like an accordion and then stayed still like a tableau. The children lost interest and the adults were grumbling. When Dandy and Grant went to the back of the Punch and Judy tent they found the puppeteer slumped dead behind the scene, with his throat cut. The police are called but Dandy and her partner, Alec take it upon themselves to investigate the murder, an apparently impossible murder, with no signs of the murderer, and no one knew the puppeteer’s name.

I liked the setting. There is a good sense of location in Dundee in the 1930s, when the effects of the First World War were still lingering and the threat of another war was on the horizon. This is a convoluted murder mystery, where there is more than meets the eye. There is a lot of detail about the publishing industry and the theatrical world of the time which was interesting, but overall the amount of detail of everyday life, with all its sights and smells, slowed the book down too much for me.

There are several complications, red herrings and apparent impossibilities and I was puzzled about the relevance of a murder 50 years earlier in the same park, of an earlier Punch and Judy man. I became a bit lost in the detail about the number of women suspects Dandy and Alec consider – there were two, and then perhaps there were three. Who were they and what was the motive for the murder? Gradually that became clear, but I got exasperated at the number of times Dandy and the others went over and over what was happening, working out how it could have happened and why. Although some of it is confusing and I hadn’t worked out the identity of the murderer some of it seemed so obvious to me that I couldn’t see why it took them so long to work it out. So, although I enjoyed the actual murder mystery and the mirror dance aspect, where everything is turned on its head, I did not enjoy how it was told.

My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for my review copy.

My Friday Post: Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Published on March 26, 2021 by Margaret22 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

This week I’m featuring Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell, one of my TBRs that I bought two years ago. It’s a standalone book, first published in 2017.

It begins with a Prologue:

Those months before she disappeared were the best. .

Chapter One begins:

Laurel let herself into her daughter’s flat. It was, even on this relatively bright day, dark and gloomy. The window at the front was overwhelmed by a terrible tangle of wisteria while the other side of the flat was completely overshadowed by the small woodland it backed onto.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
Post it.
Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 57 (page 56 is blank):

Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing left. Literally nothing.

Blurb:

She was fifteen, her mother’s golden girl.
She had her whole life ahead of her.
And then, in the blink of an eye, Ellie was gone.

Ten years on, Laurel has never given up hope of finding Ellie. And then she meets a charming and charismatic stranger who sweeps her off her feet. But what really takes her breath away is when she meets his nine-year-old daughter. Because his daughter is the image of Ellie. Now all those unanswered questions that have haunted Laurel come flooding back.

What really happened to Ellie? And who still has secrets to hide?

Can’t-Wait Wednesday: The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson

Published on March 24, 2021 by Margaret8 Comments

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings, to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they’re books that have yet to be released.

This week I’m featuring The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson, release date 3 June 2021. I’ve read just two of Ragnar Jónasson’s books in his Icelandic Hulda series and enjoyed both of them. So, I’m keen to read this one, which is a standalone novel.

Description

‘TEACHER WANTED ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD . . .’.

Una knows she is struggling to deal with her father’s sudden, tragic suicide. She spends her nights drinking alone in Reykjavik, stricken with thoughts that she might one day follow in his footsteps.

So when she sees an advert seeking a teacher for two girls in the tiny village of Skálar – population of ten – on the storm-battered north coast of the island, she sees it as a chance to escape.

But once she arrives, Una quickly realises nothing in city life has prepared her for this. The villagers are unfriendly. The weather is bleak. And, from the creaky attic bedroom of the old house where she’s living, she’s convinced she hears the ghostly sound of singing.

Una worries that she’s losing her mind.

And then, just before midwinter, a young girl from the village is found dead. Now there are only nine villagers left – and Una fears that one of them has blood on their hands . . .

What upcoming release are you eagerly anticipating?