Anthony Horowitz : The Twist of a Knife

As my days are currently being consumed by a deep de-cluttering, I am only capable of reading books that require little thought. I dropped into the library for some crime reading and, even though I said I wouldn’t do it again, came away with the latest Anthony Horowitz.

Keigo Higashino: Malice

Kate Saunders : The Secrets of Wishtide

Kate Saunders died last April at the age of 62. I knew nothing of her work until I read her obituary in The Guardian. She began her career as an actress but soon realised writing was her true path. Famous for her wit, she said of herself,

I was quite plain for an actress, but for a writer I was GORGEOUS.

Richard Cobb: A Classical Education

Simply Messing about in Books…summer 2024

We have spent our month by the sea, but indoors a great deal of the time, due to the highly changeable weather. Once I would have read about twenty books, but now we have little people in our family who are much more entertaining. So I will write a few notes on the six books I have read during this time, going from most enjoyable to disappointing.

Simply Messing about in Books

Grey clouds and night rolling in at five thirty. Winter is well on the way, in fact it officially begins tomorrow, and with it a tendency to want relaxing reading. The brain is in idling mode for a while. Diversion and detectives with odd personalities are required. But this year I find myself reading books about physical activity and yearning to take up some extravagant form of dance.

Tim Sullivan : The Monk

Tim Sullivan has written five D S George Cross novels and I am sad to say I have read them all in the last month. Sad, not because they are badly written or trashy, but sad because I will have to wait until next year before I can read his next book, The Teacher.

Peter May: A Winter Grave

Stig Abell : Death Under a Little Sky

The path meanders east, and Jake pauses again for breath, and to rest his aching arms. In the last half hour evening has truly come, the shadows are long, the air settling into the cool of the night, the breeze dropping down to a decorous whisper.

Jake Jackson, a burned-out policeman whose marriage has run out of steam is on his way to claim the inheritance his Uncle Arthur has left him. He is suffering from the trauma of many years of police work and the sadness of a marriage where the inability to have children has dried up his emotional life. The bequest comes at a good time for him. His uncle has left sufficient funds so that he need not work, and a large house full of music and detective novels into which he can retreat. The fact that Little Sky is in an out of the way place suits him very well. He needs peace and time.

Soon Jake is wild swimming, taking a daily cold plunge. There is no bathroom in his house. He also starts running, working his land, doing boxing training. In spite of his rigorous attempts at self-improvement, he is often assailed by doubt and despair. Soon, however, he meets a young woman, the local vet (she makes her rounds by bicycle) and develops other preoccupations. When will he see her next? How can he develop a friendship with a woman who has a young daughter?

With the finding of a bag of bones, things become even more complicated, and Jake has deep concerns as to whether he is leading Livia (the vet) and her daughter into danger.

This book is labelled as Jake Jackson number 1, and the author has a three-book contract with Harper Collins, so he will live to fight another day.

I do like a good self-improvement book and Jake tells us about his ventures into cooking and exercise. He does a great deal of walking and reflecting on the nature of the countryside.  

The river is becoming more and more visible, at first like a blue shoelace dropped on the land, and then something broader, the rich mingled marine colours of green, blue, brown. A few gulls squabble and shriek above him.

I found this book to be a comfortable read, in the way an Ann Cleeves book or an Elly Griffiths might be. There is the remoteness, the surly villagers, the love story, the man healing himself. The crime is, at first, only in the past, but one of the better developments was the introduction of a female journalist who had studied violence and abuse in the deep countryside,and whose researches become relevant to the story.

There are perhaps not enough suspects. I worked out the culprit because most of the other possibilities had been exhausted.

What I really didn’t like was the use of present tense, but that is perhaps a personal idiosyncracy.

If you like a slow-paced novel with not too much violence you may well enjoy this.

I really would have liked to know more about Uncle Arthur who built Little Sky and the library.

…a huge library, primarily of detective fiction, the sort of books that had been given to him throughout his childhood. All of the great English authors from the mid part of the twentieth century: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey. And long shelves of Americans, their gaudy covers gleaming: Chandler and Hammett and Spillane….

Uncle Arthur had a pretty good jazz record collection too.

I’m hoping we might learn more about him in the next two books, which of course I’m going to read.

350 pages of pleasant diversion.

Carl Hiaasen : Squeeze Me

When Kiki Pew Fitzsimons disappears from her Diamond Patrons table at the fundraiser for the Gold Coast Chapter of the IBS Wellness Foundation, (a group globally committed to defeating irritable bowel syndrome) her fellow Potussies (loyal Palm Beach women who support the new POTUS) are convinced she has been murdered by an illegal immigrant.