Tag: suspense

Book Review: The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – a tense and evocative story from the Italian Renaissance

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This novel is inspired by the Robert Browning poem ‘My Last Duchess’ as well as the historical figure of Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, who met an untimely death at the age of sixteen, supposedly murdered by her husband. I hadn’t known anything of the real duchess, but remember reading the poem in English Lit classes at uni and not realising it at the time that the duchess described had died so young.

It’s a shocking story in anybody’s book – Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics or this one, and so I demurred while The Marriage Portrait sat on my bedside table, distracting myself with every other book until, with nothing much else to read I finally picked it up. I shouldn’t have worried, having enjoyed Maggie O’Farrell’s books enormously in the past and it was only a page or two before I was engrossed in the story, as well as in awe at the writing.

Lucrezia is a difficult child, the least favourite it seems in her family, and as she grows she seems a thin little thing, quite unlike her lively, dark-haired older sisters. She’s smart though, sitting in a corner where the children are taught their lessons, but learning much faster the Latin and Greek, the history and geography than her siblings. Her real talent is art, although she could be a master spy the way she sneaks around the palace, listening at doors.

When her older sister Maria suddenly dies before her wedding can take place, Lucrezia is promised to Maria’s fiancé instead, to unite the grand houses of Medici and Ferrara, even though Lucrezia is only thirteen. She’s a spirited child, who likes her freedom, but also cherishes the safety of her home – her life has been a sheltered one. So at the time of her wedding a couple of years later, she is ill prepared to be the docile wife of a powerful ruler.

The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.

O’Farrell makes Lucrezia interesting, believable and vividly real, a complex character, as is her new husband Alfonso, who is on the surface so charming and solicitous, but also desperate for the heir that will secure his position. The book begins with Alfonso whisking Lucrezia off to a hunting lodge, away from the prying eyes of his palace, and where Lucrezia feels he is to do away with her. She has seen this other side to him before – the merciless capacity for violence, the lack of forgiveness. Will Lucrezia succumb and give in or will she fight back for her survival?

Sixteenth century Italy is brought to life – a time of a flowering of the arts which are lushly shown here in paintings, architecture and music. The intense richness of the language, vividly present tense, mirrors the gorgeousness of this Renaissance world. Yet this is also a time when well-born young women are just pawns on the chessboard of power to be married off by their fathers. Like Lucrezia they may have little idea of the politics around them or what will be expected of them.

This makes the novel a tense and gripping read as the story bounces between the hunting-lodge present where the moments tick away until Alfonso will act against his duchess, and the back-story that fills in Lucrezia’s life and how she has come to be in this predicament. It all seems so much more vivid because of the way O’Farrell writes – the intensity of Lucrezia’s feelings, the undercurrents that pass between characters, as well as the sensory details – the feel of fabric on skin, Lucrezia’s painterly eye that sees every colour and shade, the shock of seeing mountains for the first time, the descriptions of the music Alfonso gets lost in.

The Marriage Plot is a book that delivers on every level, giving you a glimpse into the past, an edge-of-the-seat story, as well as gorgeous writing. It isn’t surprising it’s been selected for the Women’s Prize for Fiction longest – I’ll be eager to see if it makes the shortlist, announced on 26 April. It will also be interesting to see what O’Farrell comes up with next. This book gets a full five stars from me.

Book Review: The Resistance Girl by Mandy Robotham – a gripping read about a less-documented corner of the war

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I’ve read a few novels about World War Two – heart-breaking stories for the most part about those who served, POWs and Concentration Camps, Intelligence Officers sent behind enemy lines and so on. But they’ve mostly been about the main players: France, Britain and Germany. I knew next to nothing about how the war affected Norway and this book was quite an eye-opener.

The resistance girl of the title is Rumi Orlstad. We meet her at a Bergen dockside railing at the war which has taken her fiancé. Magnus was lost at sea during his first voyage with the Shetland bus. I’d come across the bus in other books – the fleet of 30 odd fishing boats that ferried secret service agents and refugees between Sheltand and Norway – since 1940 under German occupation. The bus supported the Norwegian resistance, bringing supplies and instructors as well as assisting with sabotage.

Rumi’s father and step-brother help with the bus, and Rumi, motherless and alone, helps with the fishing business. It’s November, so there’s snow when she’s sent to bring two new British officers to a safe-house, both having parachuted into nearby countryside. She’s cross when she has to cut down Jens Parkes from the tree that’s caught his parachute, but luckily he can ski. Still reeling from her loss, they form an uneasy alliance. At least being half Norwegian, Jens looks the part and can blend in, hiding his radio transmitter among the clothing he collects for refugees – his cover.

While Jens gets on with supporting the cause, Rumi discovers her best friend has been sent to Lebensborn, one of many maternity camps devised by Himmler to produce an ideal Aryan race. It was felt that Norwegians – tall, blond and fair – had all the right attributes and so German officers stationed in Norway were encouraged to engage with young Norwegian women – a few married them and whisked them off to Germany. But many of these girls were just taken advantage off, like Rumi’s friend Anya, their babies planned for childless German couples.

This is where I found the book particularly interesting. Part of the narration is from the point of view of a housekeeper so it’s a bit like a fly-on-the-wall account. The housekeeper worked for the family that owned the house before the Germans requisitioned it – like so many larger properties – and she has no idea about what it’s to be used for. Little by little her fears grow as it all begins to make sense. The dormitories and the cots, the German midwives, the guards, the frightened young women.

How Rumi tries to help her friend forms a large part of the book, as well as her interactions with Jens and his dangerous missions. There are some excellent supporting characters too. The sinister Lothar Sellig – a German officer for the Abwehr – who keeps turning up like a bad penny, on his quest to clamp down on the resistance; Rumi’s neighbour Marjit who is like a mother figure to Rumi and having been a nurse during WWI is almost as determined and fearless as Rumi. She has a surprising connection with Jens.

Mandy Robotham has done plenty of research to bring the city of Bergen to life, its cafés and fishing industry, as well as the domestic settings, the traditional knitting and Norwegian meals. The horrors of what Norway endured under enemy occupation are described too: the fear of living alongside the enemy, the reprisals against insurrection. Himmler’s Lebensborn project seems particularly sinister, giving the novel some heft and the story builds towards a tense and exciting ending.

The Resistance Girl is a terrific story and would appeal to readers who have enjoyed Kate Quinn’s wartime novels. I enjoyed this book as an e-audiobook and the reader – Antonia Beamish – made the characters come alive and handled the Norwegian names like a native. Or so it seemed to me. I’ll be hunting out more by Mandy Robotham – this novel gets a four out of five from me.

Book Review: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley – another excellent twisty read in an atmospheric setting

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Lucy Foley really knows how to conjure an interesting setting. We’ve had a wedding venue on an island in The Guest List, luxury accomodation cut off by snow in The Hunting Party and here a gated apartment building in a posh part of Paris. I can see how her mind works. She’s seen a setting and wondered who lives or works there, like we all do, and then wondered what if there was a murder.

In The Paris Apartment, Jess is on the run from her job in England. She’s done something she shouldn’t have and hopped on the train for Paris to crash with her brother Ben. The two were separated as children when their mother killed herself. Ben who could charm anybody was quickly adopted and enjoyed the spoils of doting parents and a good education. Jess however, much younger and evidently not so charming, went from foster family to foster family, forever scarred by being the one to find their mother’s dead body. Her education has been minuscule which is why she’s been working in a dodgy bar.

Jess turns up at Ben’s Paris address, an apartment in a surprisingly luxurious building with an internal courtyard garden. The old lady concierge isn’t very welcoming and Ben isn’t home. But Jess is street-wise and manages to get inside anyway, fashioning her cheap hoop earrings into a device to pick the apartment lock. Inside, still no Ben, only a cat with blood on its fur. And it looks as if someone has scrubbed something off the floor using bleach. Jess begins to suspect the worst.

The gated apartment building offers a select bunch of suspects who Jess slowly gets to know. Nobody’s very friendly and nobody seems to know what Ben’s been up to lately. He’s a journalist so we can only suppose he was snooping around too much. The only one who is at all friendly is Nick, Ben’s friend who helped him secure this flat. Ben and Nick were at university together.

There’s also Sophie in the penthouse flat with her little dog and who is much nicer to the dog than people. She’s a high-maintenance middle-aged woman married to Jacques, who is mostly away on business – something to do with wine if the cellar down in the basement is anything to go by. There’s broody, menacing Antoine who frightens Jess when she first arrives. That leaves two young girls who share a flat: sensitive art student Mimi and her party-animal pal, Camille.

The story switches between the characters and backwards into the past to portray a picture of Ben, the charming Englishman interloper, from various points of view. Everyone seems to be afraid of something and they all seem to be hiding something. Just as everyone seems to have pieces missing from the puzzle. It’s going to have to be Jess who sorts it all out but who can she trust? The reader is all too aware that Ben has likely paid a price for asking too many questions. Thank goodness Jess’s got a bit of help from foreign correspondent Theo, who looks like a pirate but seems to be otherwise trustworthy because Jess is in way over her head.

Lucy Foley delivers another clever twisty mystery. How she manages to keep track of who knows what and a backwards and forward timeline suggests a pinboard covered in spreadsheets and graphs. Agatha Christie would have been impressed. Jess is the perfect character for Foley’s amateur sleuth because she is so completely at sea in this sophisticated Parisian setting, is barely educated and thoroughly naive. Instead she relies on gut instinct, driven by love for her brother and a determination for justice. The Paris Apartment comes together nicely to create a light but very satisfying read and gets a four out of five from me.

Book Review: Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic – introducing an unforgettable new sleuth

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After such a run of historical novels, I was more than ready for a good, meaty mystery and what better than some Aussie Noir. I’d been meaning to pick up the first in this series for a while because I’d read good things and the idea of a hearing-impaired private investigator sparked my interest. Calum Zelic has been profoundly deaf since a childhood illness. Now in his thirties, he’s divorced and running a private investigation company. Mostly it’s small stuff, like the case he’s got now: the theft of cigarettes in bulk from a warehouse.

Caleb is interesting because he pretends he can hear just as well as anybody else, picking up what he can from lip reading, and signing with the people who know him better. And although Caleb has a talent for reading people through their body language, it’s just as well his trusty side-kick, tough-talking ex-cop, Frankie, is there to pick up anything he’s missed. The two create some terrific dialogue as they are always sparring with each other.

When his childhood friend, Gary, is murdered in an unspeakably violent way, Caleb is both grieving and flung into danger. Gary, a policeman, has been helping Caleb with his case – maybe it’s more than just cigarettes going in and out of that warehouse. Before his death he sent Caleb a text warning him about a man named Scott. Next thing you know, Frankie has gone missing, Caleb’s running for his life and turns to Kat, his ex-wife for help. The two hide out in Resurrection Bay, Gary and Caleb’s childhood home.

In Resurrection Bay we get snippets of Caleb’s childhood, and meet Anton, Caleb’s dodgy brother, who has done time for drug-related crime. Anton says he’s turned his life around, but can you ever trust an addict? We have some interesting dynamics between the two brothers, while Caleb still carries a torch for Kat. So with the case and all, he’s a bundle of conflicting emotions.

Viskic has created a pacy crime thriller but what kept me turning the pages was the smart dialogue and quirky characters. Caleb is constantly on the receiving end of a pasting, but somehow manages to keep going. He plays a cat and mouse game in several nail-biting scenes, and unable to rely on sounds, uses his remaining senses tuned up to the max. This makes for some very dramatic moments all the while propelling Caleb to a gritty showdown and a few twisty surprises.

My only gripe was that the ending just seemed to be a little too much – the violence and the twists. A little over-egging of the pudding perhaps. Although this is probably not uncommon in this genre and the book has garnered a bunch of awards. Overall, Resurrection Bay is a great start to a new series, and I will be happy to check out the next books because Caleb is such a brilliant creation. I even developed a hankering to learn sign language. This book gets a four out of five from me.

Book Review: The Hunting Dogs by Jorn Lier Horst – a detailed police procedural with a likeable Norwegian detective

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When it comes to Scandinavian crime fiction, I’ve often thought if only there were more Wallander novels published by Henning Mankell before his death in 2015. I’ve tried other Scandinavians of course and enjoyed them – Jussi Adler Olsen’s Department Q series is worth a look. But for a more psychological read with an engaging policeman, Norwegian author, Jorn Lier Horst’s William Wisting’s novels seem to capture much of that atmosphere I’ve liked so much with Wallander.

Wisting is a Chief Inspector in his fifties at the start of The Hunting Dogs working out of the Criminal Investigation Dept of Larvik Police. This novel has him revisiting the abduction of a teenage girl who was subsequently murdered seventeen years ago. The killer, recently released Rudolf Haglund, has employed a lawyer to prove his case for wrongful imprisonment, alleging that police tampered with the evidence. As senior investigating officer at the time, Wisting is stood down from duties while an inquiry is underway.

Meanwhile, Line, Wisting’s daughter, is aware that the newspaper she works for is about to splash this story all over the front page in the morning. She is appalled – she knows her dad would never tamper with evidence to secure a conviction and rushes off into a wet, miserable night after a better story to bump the Haglund allegations onto page two. She gets caught up in a murder – a man attacked on the street, while his dog stands guard in the rain, a bit like Greyfriar’s Bobby. Great photo material. But when Line tracks down the owner and calls round to the victim’s house, she’s assaulted too.

What can the two murders have in common? Well, in real life probably nothing, but this being crime fiction, you know they’ll intersect sooner or later. Wisting heads off to his cabin in the woods to dig through old paperwork and calls on favours from a retired crime scene investigator. He studies photos of the police team involved unable to imagine who would have fiddled with those cigarette butts.

His relationship with café owner Suzanne is going south – he’s always up at dawn, and she’s always late home, while the police crime investigators are threatening a prison sentence. So Wisting’s up against it. When another teenage girl goes missing, there are echoes of the original Haglund case, and Wisting is desperate to get back in harness to find her. So much pressure, but what can he do?

If Wisting’s hands are tied, Line is all fired up to do some snooping, particularly when she spots the link between her murder victim and Haglund. She calls in her mates, too – a couple from her newspaper and an old boyfriend who turns up out of the blue. We get a brilliant scene where they show the reader how to follow a suspect. Honestly, it was like a scene from Spooks. Yes, it seems, journalists know all the tricks.

The plot steadily builds to a showdown with plenty of danger and edge of seat action. All the while you are aware that time is ticking for the abducted girl. It’s a great read, but what I really like is the detail of the detective work and how authentic it sounds. This is probably because Horst was once himself a policeman in Larvik, so the procedures around evidence storage and forensics are carefully explained and make interesting reading. We’ve also got some well-considered points around police ethics, loyalty and morality adding depth to the story.

There is plenty to like with The Hunting Dogs; the writing is crisp and the translation (thanks, Anne Bruce) is seamless, never clunky. So you can see why Horst is one of my favourites among the Scandinavians. I’m not alone – he’s won a bunch of awards, including The Petrona, a Scandi-crime fiction award for books translated into English. This one earns a four out of five from me.

Book Review: The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits by Alys Clare – a new crime-solving partnership hits Victorian London

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Alys Clare is known for her medieval mysteries, particularly the Hawkenlye and Aelf Fen books. I hear they’re really good, but these were the times when life was “nasty, brutish and short”, so I’ve always steered clear, maybe unnecessarily. But I was pleased when Clare decided to jump forward a few centuries to set her new series in 1880s London.

Lily Raynor is a private investigator who is beginning to make a name for herself with her ability to get to the bottom of things with tact and discretion. Working from her late grandparents’ apothecary shop, she finds herself too busy to manage all the filing, note-taking and plant watering at her World’s End Bureau, so decides to hire an assistant. Of the six candidates on her shortlist, only the last is in any way promising. Although Felix Wilbraham isn’t quite what she had in mind.

Felix is a from a well to-do background, but falling out with his dear papa, has been living a hand to mouth existence of late. He’s down to his last pennies when he eagerly accepts Lily’s offer of employment. And so marks the beginning of a new crime-fighting partnership. Felix has excellent penmanship and the enthusiasm of a lively puppy. He hasn’t a clue about pot plants but after his month’s trial, becomes indispensable to Lily, not just for filing and making tea, but in the field of inquiry.

The story cracks on with two cases for the bureau. Lily attends a private member’s club to interview Lord Berwick who is worried about his son – a weak young who has become besotted with an ageing actress. But she’s not Lady Berwick material so Lily is asked to investigate her background and to see if she’s merely toying with young Julian and if there’s anything about her that might cool Julian’s ardour. Meanwhile Felix interviews a Mr Stibbins who is worried about his wife. They are a happy couple, and Mrs Stibbins helps out the bereaved through her work as a medium. But lately she has a feeling that her life is in danger.

So two quite different cases. But as the smart reader will remember from the prologue, Mrs Stibbins isn’t the only woman in danger – a young girl has been murdered in the vicinity and soon the bureau is caught up with the matter of women, mainly prostitutes, who have gone missing. This really cranks up the danger, especially when Lily plays a duplicitous game. The story builds to a nail-biting ending to reveal a criminal with a particularly original bent.

This is an intelligently plotted and engaging story with two likeable main characters. Lily has a background in midwifery, but a shadow clouding her past she thinks of as The Incident, has seen her eager to change profession. She has an interesting association with a canal boatman who has a gypsy-like alternative life-style and an other-worldly wisdom.

Felix’s experiences as an older woman’s plaything, along with his knowledge of the seamier theatre world, help him with the Berwick case. So both he and Lily have secrets that they are as yet unwilling to share with each other. This sets the scene for some interesting character development and dynamics that will no doubt affect their working relationship.

This is a very entertaining and relaxing period mystery that never gets too dark, in spite of the grimmer side of Victorian London emerging from time to time. You get a strong sense of the rigidity of a class system that keeps people in their place and that women like Lily are pushing boundaries by determining their own futures. She’s a complex character and I look forward to getting to know her better through the series. (Book number two is The Outcast Girls.) The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits scores a four out of five from me.

Book Review: The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard – a complex and original page-turner with a twist

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What does a Japanese crime boss, a chemical defence base in Cornwall and real estate in Iceland have in common? They are all part of a complex new thriller by Robert Goddard. I had really enjoyed Goddard’s Wide World trilogy set during the time of the Versailles treaty negotiations after World War One. So I knew Goddard could throw together a twisty, action packed story with engaging characters, witty writing and an ending you don’t see coming.

And so it is here. The Fine Art of Invisible Detection begins with a difficult case for the Kodaka Detective Agency in Tokyo. Umiko Wada mostly does the office work but a new case has her packing her bags for London to impersonate a client. Mrs Takenada wants to discover if her father really committed suicide on a business to London in 1977. Or did his connections with notorious career criminal, Nishizaki, lead to his murder? She’s received a letter from a Martin Caldwell asking to meet up. He has evidence about a former friend of his who worked as an interpreter for Mrs Takenada’s dad. But Mrs T’s family are cautious so Wada is sent in her place.

With the sudden suspicious death of her boss Wada might be biting off more than she can chew, but Wada is smart, careful and has one thing that many other private detectives might envy: she has the knack for blending in with a crowd. When Martin doesn’t arrive at the appointed time for their interview, you can’t help wondering if something has happened to him as well.

The story switches between Wada’s narrative and that of Nick Miller, an art teacher that Martin has been in touch with as well. Similarly Martin fails to show up to meet Nick and so Nick and Wada both conduct their own investigations into what Martin had been trying to tell them and why he might be missing.

The story takes the reader to Nancekuke in Cornwall where the British military had been conducting trials on chemical weapons, in particular sarin gas acquired from the Nazis at the end of World War Two. Wada has her own personal connection with sarin – her husband was a victim of the sarin gas attack on a Tokyo train in the 90s and took twelve years to die. But what could any of this have to do with her possible suicide victim in London? She and Nick will both find themselves travelling to Iceland to find out.

This is another brilliant twisty read with all kinds of story threads going off in different directions and then somehow coming back together. Wada is a great character, discovering as she goes on how to be a credible private detective. Fortunately she can think on her feet and has a cool head because someone is out to stop her. Nick is interesting because he is the mostly unlikely of heroes, but he has the strong emotional pull of someone grieving a parent, while trying to find the truth of his paternity. Goddard doesn’t let him sit around drinking tea and pondering what’s what however. Like Wada, he’s on and off planes, visiting crime-scenes, getting caught up in the action and fearing for his life.

The story builds to a thrilling ending and who knows, maybe another case for Wada, although Goddard mostly writes one-offs. Personally, I’d be happy to visit the Kodaka Detective Agency again. Wada is interesting company. Goddard manages to write from the point of view of a middle-aged Japanese woman and make her seem credible. The history around the Nancekuke base will have you searching the Internet and what you discover makes for some grim reading. I like it when you have a rip-roaring read with some substance and that’s certainly the case here. A four out of five read from me.

Book Review: Mrs England by Stacey Halls – secrets and suspense in a Yorkshire mill town

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The blurb on the book mentioned the word ‘Gothic’ and so I opened the book expecting some chilling scenes and perhaps even hauntings. My earlier experience of this author had been The Familiars, a gripping story about witch hunts in 17th Century England. So I knew Halls could take us to some dark places. And there is a degree of darkness here, of menace even, but is it Gothic?

Certainly there’s a large stately home in an isolated part of Yorkshire. It’s mill country, and the air is thick with coal-dust from all the steam-powered cotton milling machinery. Ruby May is a Norland nanny who has just said goodbye to her first family now they’re off to Chicago. She’d love to go too, but her own family need her. She’s a humble grocer’s daughter from Birmingham and there’s a tragedy in her past that has left her hating her father and with a disabled sister.

She takes the only job on offer – nobody wants a nanny in the summer holiday season – to take charge of four children ranging from a year to ten year’s old. Mr England’s old nanny has died and the children soon warm to Ruby, who takes them on outings and supervises a better diet. She is almost like the mother to them – Mrs England rarely leaves her room. Mr England makes up for his wife’s lack of engagement with her children by being an affectionate father and is surprisingly friendly to Ruby, which she finds disconcerting.

Other characters include Mr Booth, young Saul’s tutor, who confides in Ruby that there’s something not quite right in the household. Blaise, the housemaid, is plain spoken and haughty towards Ruby, as if she suspects Ruby might lord it over the staff and wants to nip any such superiority in the bud. We meet Mrs England’s family, the Greatrexes, who own a larger mill and even a town, and with whom Mrs England has a strained relationship. So Ruby is caught between upstairs and downstairs, not quite a servant while having to tiptoe round the feelings of her employers.

Thank goodness she warms to the children, but you can’t help feeling that they could be in danger and this drives the plot. There’s a hint of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, so perhaps that’s where the Gothic quality lies. Ruby does all she can to keep the children safe, but she can’t do it all alone, and who can she trust? The story builds to a dramatic ending and although it takes a while to get going, it’s still really engaging. I think this is because Ruby herself is interesting: her worries about her own family and in particular her falling out with her father. Halls feeds out just enough information to keep you curious.

One story thread of Mrs England is based on an event that really happened, which is briefly described in a note at the end of the novel. If you want to maintain the maximum suspense as you read, don’t read this until you finish the story, but it is extraordinary. I like the way Stacey Halls seems to draw inspiration from real events for her novels – she is turning out to be one of my must-read authors. She really gets under the skin of her characters, bringing the past to life and this book continues the trend. It’s a gently cracking read and gets a four out of five from me.

Book Review: The Searcher by Tana French

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I loved Tana French’s last book, The Wych Elm – a twisty, psychological mystery with loads of secrets, a troubled, unreliable main character and a beguilingly chatty narrative voice. So naturally, I was keen to see what she would come up with next. I expected something similar with The Searcher, but really this is quite a different sort of novel altogether.

For while we back in Ireland, this is rural Ireland, not an Irish city, and we have a very different way of doing things, a slower pace that suits the story as well. And our narrator, Cal Hooper, is a retired cop from Chicago, so the narrative voice is quite different too. He’s not a high flying ex-detective either, more a veteran of the beat, well aware of the sorts of crimes committed by the young and the desperate. Which comes in handy when he meets thirteen-year-old Trey.

Cal is two-years single, and for some reason thinks what he wants is a small holding in the middle of nowhere, the local village boasting a shop and a pub and not much else. His house needs everything done to it, and he is slowly putting in the hours with the paint and sandpaper when his cop’s sixth-sense tells him someone is watching him. So what does he do? He puts soil under his windows so he can check for footprints. Eventually he meets the ‘spy’ – a scrawny teenager with a problem, if only Cal can get the truth out of him.

Eventually Trey spills the beans – his older brother is missing. Trey comes from a family shunned by the villagers because of a bad-news father, now in Dublin, and a bunch of kids known for truancy and minor misdemeanours, a mother that’s not really coping. Nobody gives them a hand, which says something about the locals. Cal tells Trey how the police go about investigating missing persons and reluctantly puts together a plan. This includes talking to witnesses, the friends and associates that might know something to create a picture of what Brendan was up to before he disappeared.

The Searcher is a slow-burner that may lose the less-persistent reader. We have to meet the locals: Mart the chatty neighbour who gives Cal stick about women and invites him to the pub; Noreen, shopkeeper and town gossip; Lena, the potential love-interest. There’s Donie MacGrath, the town low-life who thinks he’s way smarter than he is and Mart’s odd-ball friends. Random sheep are savaged and down at the pub there is talk of wild cats and UFOs. It’s hard for Cal to get anybody’s story straight, there is just so much blarney.

But the pace picks up and pretty soon Cal finds there are secrets someone is determined to keep hidden to the point that things take a more violent turn. This does a lot to add suspense, but so does the atmosphere which is created out of the setting with its wild and lonely scenery, the natural distrust of the villagers for any disruption to their way of life. The author also creates a picture of a place with no future, its youth leaving in droves, or finding other outlets for their desperation.

Tana French does a brilliant job to bring this all together in a dramatic and sensitive way, making this a very intelligent sort of crime novel. Cal is a great character, being such a fish out of water and surprisingly trusting for an ex-Chicago cop. He has plenty to learn about people and his place in village life. The story builds to an ending that keeps you with bated breath, and a resolution that for me was deeply satisfying. And while The Searcher is quite a different reading experience from The Wych Elm, the two are both crafted, character-driven novels exploring the dark side of human nature. This one’s easily a four out of five star read from me.

Book Review: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

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There’s nothing like a good psychological thriller to while away a wet weekend. The Silent Patient ticks all the boxes, combining a troubled narrator who in this case is a psychotherapist, an even more troubled patient and the mystery surrounding the death of her husband.

Theo Faber has recently taken a post at The Grove, a care facility for troubled minds and is particularly interested in one patient. Alicia is a former artist of some note who has remained unable to talk since supposedly murdering her husband, the famous photographer Gabriel Berenson. The media have made a lot of their story which has done heaps to push up the value of Gabriel’s work.

If Theo can persuade Alicia to speak about the night her husband died, Alicia may begin to heal. But because of her suicide attempts, Alicia is highly medicated at The Grove, doesn’t interact with other staff or patients, nor does she respond to any kind of therapy. The story is told mostly through the voice of Theo, himself a survivor of a terrible childhood and for whom psychotherapy has changed his life. He is convinced he can help Alicia and manages to persuade his boss, the avuncular Dr Diomedes and Christian, Alicia’s surly psychologist, to reduce her meds and let him try.

As well as tensions at The Grove, which is under threat of closure, not to mention volatile patients who do violent things, Theo gets into trouble by breaking rules. He interviews Alicia’s friends and relatives – the brother-in-law solicitor, Max, who has a bit of a temper; Alicia’s cousin Paul who still lives in the ramshackle house they grew up in with his monstrous mother; and Alicia’s old friend and art curator, Jean-Felix, who like pretty much everyone else is holding something back. Michaelides also allows Alicia’s own voice to tell the story through a hidden diary, which throws up some interesting questions. Then there’s Alicia’s symbolic and dramatic art. Her last picture is titled Alcestis after the Ancient Greek story popularised by Euripides about another wife driven to silence by love.

We have all the ingredients for a suspenseful and nuanced thriller, drawing you in through the thoughts of the therapist/patient combo of Theo and Alicia. In the background there are dangers lurking and a sense of impending doom. But it wouldn’t be a good thriller without a few interesting plot twists and Michaelides is a master at this. Already known for his work as a screenwriter, this is his first novel and it would be easy to see the book as a movie. But I also really enjoyed the writing and am happy to learn he’s sticking with fiction for now and has a new book on the horizon. For me the pages whizzed by as I raced to find out what really happened to Alicia and Gabriel. A four out of five read from me.