Sherrie Hewson, formerly an actress on Coronation Street and now a regular at ITV's day time topical discussion programme Loose Women, graduated with honours last year as the winner of the BBC's crime writing celebrity reality show Murder Most Famous. She passed the excruciating Minette Walters quality control test to win with her prose for The Tannery and it has now reached print as a 114 page Quick Read from Pan Books. Faced with a 20k word count limit, how does it fare?
Let's put this one in the psychological thriller category, because someone is playing psychological games with Maria's mind and the prose has a pace worthy of a thriller. In Back to the Coast, Maria, an Amsterdam-based singer with a covers band already has two children by two different fathers and then she finds herself pregnant again (by the second). Feeling that circumstances are not ideal to bring another child into the world, she has an abortion. Following this, a set of communication and stalking starts which sees Maria fleeing back to the coast of her childhood and refuge at her sister's, in what used to be the parental B&B of their awkward upbringing, now converted into a family home. Just who is stalking Maria and for what purpose?
Continue reading "Back to the Coast - Saskia Noort (translated by Laura Vroomen)" »
Having had one job interview this week, which went pretty well, on wending my way home I stopped off at Sainsbury's and ploughed rather a lot of dosh into their coffers to fill my freezer and fridge. (In times of recession there can be nothing so wasteful as a half-empty freezer.) And before leaving, I spied a copy of the latest Bond DVD, so I treated myself.
On Saturday afternoon, I lay on the sofa for some quality Bond time. After the over-long title intro, it became obvious, almost instantly, that this was not a movie to watch in the horizontal position. It opens with a car chase - involving guns, naturally - on some perilous roads in Italy. For the run time of 100 minutes I am sure my blood pressure was raised. Had I seen this on a big screen in the cinema, I believe medication would have been advised. And it all seemed so real: every punch; every dive; every freefall; every shot.
Continue reading "Quantum of Solace, James Bond's latest outing on DVD now" »
Well, Amazon says for the synopsis of Gutted:
"When the gangland owner of a pit bull that killed a three-year-old girl is found gutted on an Edinburgh hill Gus Dury is asked to investigate, and soon finds himself up to his neck in the warring underworld of the city's sink estates. Amidst illegal dog fights, a missing fifty grand and a police force and judiciary desperate to cover their links to a brutal killing, Gus must work fast to root out the truth, whilst the case sinks its teeth ever deeper into him."
So what does the novel deliver?
There will be inevitable comparisons with Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and Allan Guthrie, but Tony Black's Edinburgh-set crime novels have a unique voice and character of their own. Gutted, his second novel, more than lives up to the expectations generated by his 2008 debut, Paying For It.
This author was four books in by the time I caught up with Karin Alvtegen, great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (creator of Pippi Longstocking), courtesy of Canongate, her UK translated-into-English publisher. (Translated by McKinley Burnett.) The tense and heart-gripping opening of Shadow drew me in: a vulnerable little boy, who knew how to behave because of his mother's directions, and concentrated on them forcefully, was left on the steps of an amusement park, with little but a Bambi audio story to amuse him over the forthcoming hours and with his loyal little heart full of concern that he adhered to the discipline instilled in him. He was anxious to pee, but he had been told not to move, so he held on. Only when a guard came and he could hold on no more and he found a small scrap of trust in that new adult, did he run for the loo. In his absence the guard was able to sort through the child's meagre belongings and find a note which said "Take care of this child. Forgive me."
Then, through her lonely death, Alvtegen introduces us to the life of Gerda Persson, as the district commissioner's estate administrator, Marianne Folkesson attempts to seek the dead woman's next of kin. As she leaves the woman's home, she has one clue with which to make a start: signed copies of books by Nobel Prize-winning author Axel Ragnerfeldt. And so a tale begins that follows three generations of Ragnerfeldts and the few people who made it into their private lives. The behaviour of the various Ragnerfeldts suggests that the apples are not ripe in the orchard and over time, secrets, bitterness, forced motivations and revenge are allowed to unfold. And eventually, we also find out what happened to that poor boy and his mother.
I think it was back in 2004 that I discovered Robert Wilson. Everybody had been raving about The Blind Man of Seville and eventually I got my hands on a copy. What I read was a gem and the bar was raised; this was certified chocolatier writing and not Galaxy bar. Some other authors then seemed bland and formulaic: Enid Blyton with added gore for adults. (I subsequently left them on the shelves.) This was the start of a quartet and I continued reading and enjoying. And now comes the fourth and final - The Ignorance of Blood - a novel I couldn't wait to read, couldn't wait to finish, but also didn't want to finish. Reading completed, I have to admit to what was a 24hr period of literary mourning; whatever came next was not going to live up to this novel, and the wonderful character of Javier Falcón deserved a respectful period of silence.
Dividing his time between England and Portugal, near the Spanish border, Robert Wilson recently spent a week in the UK. His highlights included “a great lunch in Moro, which is my favourite London restaurant” and his first visit to Highgate Cemetery, with his wife. In the busy week that The Ignorance of Blood was published in the UK, Robert Wilson also, very kindly, took some time out to answer a few questions for this blog.
I wondered how he felt now that he had delivered the final in the Falcón quartet and if he missed the character and writing about him. But perhaps it was more a sense of relief that was evident in his reply. “Strangely enough I felt as if I’d delivered him to a better place in the world than where he’d been at the beginning of The Blind Man of Seville, so whilst I was sad to be leaving him to get on with his own life without my interference, I felt satisfied that he could manage it better.”
UK-based reader of crime fiction for many years.
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