Tag: thrillers

Book Review: The Bookseller of Inverness by S G MacLean – a stunning Scottish thriller of intrigue and revenge

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

It’s hard for me not to feel a lump in my throat when reading a book that describes so vividly the events around the Jacobite uprisings that aimed to put a Stuart back on the throne. The butchery and barbarism of the government forces at the Battle of Culloden, the subsequent hunting down of Jacobites through Scotland and the harsh penalties enacted on those that were captured, including the ‘traitor’s death’, are hard to read about without feeling, well, rather cross.

With The Bookseller of Inverness, S G Maclean brings this history to life. It’s a murder mystery set in the Highland city of Inverness, the bookseller of the title, Iain MacGillivray, a veteran of Culloden who has somehow survived, though scarred both physically and mentally. He’s a brooding man of thirty-four, silent and dour as he runs his shop and lending library, coming to life a little at dances where he’s a popular fiddler.

Iain’s world is turned upside down and he is hauled out of his melancholy when several events happen in rapid succession. A stranger is found murdered in his bookshop – he’d previously been fossicking for a book he was desperate to find. And we have the return to Scotland of Iain’s father, Hector, who if found by the authorities will surely face death for his connection to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender.

On his desk lay a dirk like the one he had once habitually carried, before the bearing of arms or the wearing of tartan had been forbidden to Highlanders. Tied to the hilt of his knife, though, was a white silk rosette. Iain’s heart began to quicken. It was the white cockade, as worn in his own blue bonnet and in that of practically every other soldier of the prince’s army in the ’45. The white cockade, the most recognisable of all the Jacobite symbols, on the hilt of the knife that had been used to cut the throat of the man sitting dead in his locked bookshop.

Hector tells Iain about The Book of Forbidden Names, which has coded messages revealing traitors to the Jacobite cause. These are not just people who have sided with the government, but those who have ratted on the prince’s followers leading to their capture. Both sides would give their eye teeth for this book, including the victim found in Iain’s shop. Iain thinks he knows where another copy of the book might be, and soon more bodies turn up. It seems there is a killer out there with revenge in mind.

The novel is a brilliant murder mystery/thriller, but it is also an evocative imagining of Inverness in the 1750s, and boasts a wonderful cast of characters. There are the Grandes Dames, the elderly women who gather in Iain’s grandmother’s parlour who add a lighter tone to the story with their gossip; Mairi Farquharson, Iain’s grandmother rules the roost and is fearless in her standing up to English soldiers; Donald Mòr, Iain’s oddball bookbinder, is a master craftsman but spends most of the weekend either drunk or in the cells; the mysterious Ishbel MacLeod, the confectioner and her adopted son Tormod who hangs out with Donald.

Iain’s father Hector is a marvellous invention, a risk-taker and flirt, who in his sixties shows no signs of slowing down. Iain has a difficult time reining him in. There are some nasty English soldiers garrisoned at the town to collect rents and supposedly manage any Jacobite stirrings, but there are good army officers too.

MacLean has done loads of research and adds a lengthy bibliography at the end of the book. Here she explains also about the divisions within the Scots, those for or against the Jacobite cause, those who changed sides and those clans who were divided. Like all good historical fiction, her novel makes you want to read more about what really happened.

The background to the novel may sound a little grim, but The Bookseller of Inverness is a rollicking adventure laced with dry Scottish humour. There’s a bit of romance and the storyline has plenty of interesting twists. Iain is a bit of a hot-headed blunderer, not your Poirot kind of sleuth, and gets himself into some odd corners, but with people like his crazy bookbinder, Donald Mòr, at hand, he manages to get away with it. Underneath his terse manner lies a fierce loyalty to his family.

It would be terrific to think we might join Iain again for another mystery and some more Scottish history, but this book seems to be a stand-alone novel. And the ending leaves things nicely tied up too. But we can live in hope. I enjoyed it so much I’m giving it five stars, and can’t wait to read some more from S G MacLean.

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

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

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: The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley – a tense mystery that keeps you guessing

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This novel is very similar in structure to The Guest List, Foley’s later book (which I reviewed last year) so it’s hard not to make comparisons. Both use the same before and now time shifts and leave the reader guessing not only who the murderer is – there are multiple candidates – but also the identity of the victim. The cast of characters – victims, witnesses and suspects – is cut off from the world by a weather event in both books. So beginning the earlier book, I asked myself, should I feel a little short-changed?

But in no time The Hunting Party swept me off into the story, because Foley is superb at creating tension and drama. The scenario is a group of nine friends who take the train for a weekend away in Scotland to see in the New Year at a remote hunting lodge. Most of them have been friends since university, although it is Emma, a more recent addition to the group, who arranges everything. She’s here as she’s Mark’s girlfriend. Mark is Julian’s best mate and Julian is married to Miranda, and these two are the alpha couple of the group. Julian and Miranda are fabulously wealthy and incredibly good looking. They seem to have it all and as we know that means trouble, particularly with their continued disregard for other people’s feelings.

The lodge is run by two live-in staff. Heather, recovering from loss, prefers her own company and the quiet of the remote setting. Doug is also running away from something – a checkered past that includes PTSD from his stints as a soldier in Afghanistan. His past is littered with violence, and he’s in charge of the shooting. You can’t help wondering what it might take to set him off. The presumptuousness and bad behaviour of a group of drunk friends might just do the trick.

Not long into the story there is a snow storm which turns the hunting lodge and its grounds into an island. When a body is found, emergency services are unable to send help until the weather lets up, leaving Heather and Doug to manage the situation – two very fragile people.

As I said, Foley is a master at building tension, the before and now time-frame keeps you guessing, but slowly fills you in with what’s going on in the heads of several characters, as well as their interactions with others. The party of friends are mostly people you wouldn’t want to spends a lot time with. There are supreme displays of arrogance and one-up-manship, and multiple secrets. Games of Twister and Truth or Dare oiled with an abundance of alcohol as well as drugs don’t help. It’s easy to empathise with Heather and even Doug, who appear vulnerable. Can they trust each other enough to keep things from boiling over?

The story bounces along to a tense ending where more violence is set to happen and the method and motives keep you guessing till the end. Overall I had to feel happy with the story as I was well entertained. The audiobook version I listened to was well-done and brought the book to life superbly. But I wonder if Lucy Foley will break out with a new type of story for her next novel. A better class of beach read, I’m going to give The Hunting Party a three and a half out of five.

Book Review: The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor

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The Marwood and Lovett series is such a joy for anyone who loves a good mystery, with a historical setting that takes you there. Taylor’s series brings alive the nitty gritty of everyday life plus the machinations of the powerful at court. Set during the reign of Charles II, The Royal Secret has government agent James Marwood investigate the death of a former colleague, a Mr Abbott. He comes across the man in his cups and full of regret on his way from a gambling house.

When Abbott dies suddenly, it is hard not the think about the opening scene of the novel, where Abbott’s stepdaughter and a young maid plot his death by witchcraft. But the twenty-first century reader knows that the man’s death will be a lot more complicated than that. Another incident sees Marwood getting in Cat Lovett’s bad books when he takes her to the theatre and ogles the leading actress. The two have been friends and associates through several hair-raising adventures and now meet regularly for outings. Dating? I think not.

Cat has inherited her husband’s architecture business and at the theatre, meets her client, Mr Fanshaw, along with a Dutchman, Mr Van Riebeeck, a family connection of Fanshaw’s. Cat is charmed by Van Riebeeck, while Marwood takes an instant dislike to the man. The scene also introduces us to the world of the Dutch in England at the time and the political difficulties posed by rivalry between the Netherlands and France. This rivalry will come closer to home when Cat earns a commission to design a poultry-house for the King’s sister who lives at the French court. So many threads of historical interest.

The plot ramps up with plenty of action – James Marwood seems to attract trouble, as his suspicions around Van Riebeeck grow along with jealousy over Cat’s growing friendship with the man. There’s the usual tension of Cat and Marlow’s see-sawing relationship and Marwood is often in trouble with his own servants, which adds a degree of lightness.

While we get to see kings and their courts close up, their finery and excesses, Taylor doesn’t stint when it comes to describing the grubbiness of ordinary life in the 1600s. Characters puke, piss and evacuate their bowels in fairly graphic ways, not surprisingly when there are growing suspicions of poisonings. He throws in some other quirky details, such as the interest in collecting by the wealthy. Fanshaw, an avid collector, adds a disconsolate and elderly lion to his household, caged in the garden to impress visitors.

It’s a brilliant read, well-researched, pacy and as for the characters, I can’t get enough of Cat and Marwood – they are so lively and interesting. Sometimes you want to bang their heads together. But in a world where it is important to find favour in the right places, not just to succeed but to survive, they are refreshingly themselves and more inquisitive than is good for them. I can’t wait for the next book in the series. This one’s a four and a half out of five 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.

Book Review: The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

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Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? That could be the subtitle of many a Lisa Jewell novel.

The Family Upstairs starts happily enough with twenty-five-year-old Libby Jones coming into an inheritance. Libby has always known she was adopted and is prepared for some news of her provenance the day of her birthday and maybe, with luck, a few hundred pounds. What she doesn’t expect is to inherit a large house in Chelsea, worth millions. It’s a shock for a girl who works for a kitchen design company and financially is just getting by.

The other thing she doesn’t expect is to discover that her parents, Harry and Martina Lamb, and an unidentified male died in a suicide pact when she was 10 months old. And before the bodies were found, somebody looked after the baby, then disappeared. It’s a lot to take in and the house itself creeps her out – it’s dilapidated, and there are signs someone’s been camping out upstairs, and what are those noises?

The story flips between Libby and two other characters. First off there’s Henry Lamb, the twelve-year-old son of Martina and Harry who’s looking forward to his new school when everything changes. His father, once a somewhat shady businessman, has a mild stroke and Martina, wanting to play Lady Bountiful, begins inviting people to stay. When the Thomsen family move in, Henry is mesmerised by their beautiful son, Phin. Things take a sinister turn or two as Henry slowly fills us in on events that lead up to the suicide pact. He’s an oddly distant character, with no friends and left far too much on his own.

Flipping forward again, we’re in the south of France, where Lucy is homeless, struggling to make a living for herself and her two children as a busker. A message on her phone reminds her that ‘the baby’ has turned twenty-five and she becomes determined to do anything she can to get back to England. If only she had a passport. Even before that she has to find the money to pay for the repairs on her violin. When her son Marco reveals he has recently seen his father, a man capable of horrible violence, Lucy has the extra worry of how to ask him for help without conditions.

The three stories carry the reader through to a point where past and present converge and the trio of narrators meet up. Libby garners the help of Miller Rowe, the journalist who has wasted years and his marriage investigating what happened at the Chelsea house, and her colleague Dido who has the wisdom of being ten years older than Libby. It is probably just as well; left to herself, Libby wouldn’t have coped at all.

The story comes together in a cleverly paced way that has you galloping through the book to find out what happened earlier and what will happen next. The backwards and forwards sequence gives you lots of aha moments, while spicing up the tension. But in the end, this isn’t anything like Gone Girl for upsetting revelations, whatever promised by the cover so don’t be too disappointed.

This is a subtler kind of thriller altogether. For in spite of a resolution that promises new beginnings, there are lurking in the background some disturbing niggles. You can’t help thinking that the children from the Chelsea house will always have a tough time settling down to be normal, well-adjusted people. You might be thanking your lucky stars you didn’t grow up at an expensive address like this one. I listened to this novel as an audiobook, and it was superbly read with a different actor for each of the three main characters. A four out of five star read from me.

Book Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

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Psychological thrillers aren’t my favourite genre but I do make time to read anything that comes along by Ruth Ware. She is such a master of atmospheric settings and unreliable narrators. In The Turn of the Key, the story is told in letters from Rowan Caine, a young woman in prison for murdering a child in her care. So potentially, this is about as unreliable as you can get.

Rowan is writing to a top barrister, hoping he will review her case and secure her release. She swears she is innocent. The best way to explain why she’s innocent is to tell him everything as it happened. The story begins with Rowan answering an ad for a live-in nanny for a family in a remote part of Scotland. Sandra and Bill are high-flying architects, their home, Heatherbrae, a modernised Victorian manor with electronics that run everything from the temperature in your shower to the fridge telling you when to buy more milk.

The couple have seen nanny after nanny abandon their four gorgeous girls. Perhaps it’s the remoteness of the house, far from the bright lights. Then again, the children can be a handful (wee Petra is a typical two-year-old, Maddie sullen and scheming, Ellen highly strung and Rhiannon a rebellious teen), but someone as experienced in childcare as Rowan should manage just fine. Is it the controlling and creepy Happy app, that allows Sandra and Bill to tune in to what’s going on at home wherever they are? Or is it something about the house?

The title of the book will soon have you thinking of the Henry James ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, where again we have a nanny killing a child. And there’s definitely something weird and supernatural going on here. Tragedy has struck Heatherbrae before – the ghost of a former owner, the one who planted the walled and locked poison garden, is said to haunt the house. Ware has everything set up for a tense and chilling read.

With the bulk of the story from Rowan’s point of view, we follow her difficulties, first with the children and the spiteful housekeeper – thank goodness she makes a friend in Jack, the hunky handyman – and then with eerie happenings at night. Surely the house can’t really be haunted, can it? Or worse, does it have a mind of its own. It starts to seem a little bit like The Twilight Zone.

Rowan is determined to get to the bottom of things. She’s not a quitter like those other nannies. And like the good-hearted person she is, she develops a fondness for her charges, even stroppy Rhiannon. But there are secrets here as well as creepy happenings and a few terrific twists before we turn the last page.

Ruth Ware has been dubbed ‘the queen of just-one-more-chapter’, and the title is never more fitting than with this novel. I dare you to pick it up and try to put it aside, even if you think you don’t really like psychological thrillers. The Turn of the Key shows Ware at the top of her game. (If you like this one, try The Woman in Cabin 10 which is another doozy.) This one gets a solid four out five from me.

Pandemic Reading Part 2: A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh

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This book is definitely a little closer to home than The Last Hours, my previous pandemic read. A Lovely Way to Burn describes a modern-day pandemic – the kind that kills virtually everyone who catches it. Unofficially called ‘The Sweats’, it seems to have caught everyone off-guard. There’s no obvious policy for mask-wearing or lock-downs while people panic, party like there’s no tomorrow or carry on as usual.

In the latter category is Londoner Stevie Flint. We meet up with her at work, where she’s a presenter on a TV shopping channel. After a busy day persuading people to buy guff they don’t really need, she is miffed to discover her surgeon boyfriend, Simon, has stood her up – no apologetic text or phone-call. Maybe their relationship has run its course, she wonders. Dropping by Simon’s flat to pick up a dress and some rather expensive toiletries she’d left in his bathroom, Stevie finds Simon’s dead body and calls the police.

The problem is, Simon doesn’t seem to have died of The Sweats. The police say it’s natural causes, and yet he was always so fit. Stevie is left to ponder how little she really knew about him, and then she gets sick. When, surprisingly, Stevie recovers she receives a letter from Simon – one of those ‘in the event of my death’ missals which sets her on course for a whole lot of trouble.

Simon worked in paediatrics – in particular, finding a cure for children with cerebral palsy, along with several colleagues who were also his closest friends. Having hidden a laptop containing sensitive information in Stevie’s flat, Simon has requested her to take it to a Mr Reah and absolutely no one else. When Stevie tries to track Reah down at Simon’s hospital, she finds he has died, and not surprisingly, that as a survivor of The Sweats, Stevie is medical hot property.

So begins a gripping cat-and-mouse story, as Stevie, believing Simon to have been murdered, attempts to discover the secrets on the laptop. There are people out to get her, she has to fight off more than one assailant, and take a punt on who to ask for help. In the background, London grinds to a halt, there are curfews and the army rolls in to help maintain order.

I wanted to yell at Stevie that she had to get in some supplies, fill her car up with gas and get out while she could. That she should find a cottage in the country somewhere with a big vegetable garden and maybe a henhouse; that her amateur sleuthing could wait. Simon would still be dead and in a week or two; chances are the evil perpetrator would likely enough be dead too. But then we wouldn’t have had much of a story here, would we?

A Lovely Way to Burn is the kind of book that has you in thrall from page one. It reminded me a little of The Thirty-nine Steps by John Buchan with our beleaguered heroine holding a secret she doesn’t understand that someone wants to kill for. And there’s the surviving against the odds aspect that ramps things up a gear. It may not be the book for you if you’re squeamish about disease, bodily fluids and the misery of knowing your number’s up and there’s nothing you can do about it. And rats, there are those too.

But however icky things got, I found I couldn’t put the book down. A Lovely Way to Burn is the first in Welsh’s Plague Times trilogy, and I shall look forward to checking in with Stevie again – she’s a great character. Will Stevie get out of London, find a bolt-hole to hide in while the world as she knows it disintegrates? What will the world like be after that? A new regime based on subsistence agriculture or will chaos prevail? I can’t wait to find out. Some copy-editing issues did slightly spoil my reading pleasure, so this one’s a three and a half out of five from me.