"The Flanders Panel" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the art world in Madrid. With a large dose of chess.

Julia is an art restorer working on a Flemish painting showing two men playing chess as a woman at a window reads. An X-ray of the painting reveals a hidden inscription: who killed the knight? She consults her ex-lover Álvaro, an art historian, the woman who is arranging the sale of the painting Menchu, her 'guardian', the gloriously camp César, an antique dealer, and shabby down at heal chess genius Muñoz. They start investigating the painting. Then Álvaro is found dead.

By reverse-playing the game shown on the painting, Muñoz works out who captured the knight. This part of the mystery is solved by the 50% turning point. Then Julia keeps finding cards with chess moves written on them and she realises that Álvaro's killer is playing the game (as black) on from the position shown in the painting and that more deaths must occur before either white or black's king is check-mated. The murder mystery must be solved before Julia, the white queen, becomes another victim.

I love this sort of murder mystery with added historical puzzles and it was a classic example of its kind. The chess problems were explained so even a layman like myself was able to understand. But I expected more than I received. I was disappointed that the characters were such stereotypes: all the art world people were elegant and cultured and bitchy and the others included a dumb gigolo, a stupid policeman and the chess expert who was the classic private investigating loner in his shabby dress and his diffident manner. It was also disappointing that the historical mystery was solved in the first half, and so easily. There was a certain amount of what felt like padding in the middle as the characters talked of chess in Freudian terms and considered layers of meaning in terms of chess, and Bach (the owner of the painting was, wouldn't you know, an ex-conductor), and recursiveness: the influence of Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was acknowledged in the epigraphs to chapters 9 and 11. 

A fun murder mystery but I was expecting more.

Selected quotes:

• “Life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.” (Ch 1)
• “He had the unmistakable air of someone defeated before the battle has even started, of someone who, when he opens his eyes each morning, awakens only to failure.” (Ch 8)
• “Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father.” (Ch 9)
• “An exception doesn't prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That's why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning.” (Ch 11)
• “In all businesses, unimpeachable honesty is the surest route to death from starvation.” (Ch 15)

July 2025; 295 pages

First published in Madrid by Alfaguara SA in 1990

My edition, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, was published by Harper Collins in 1994

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Detailed summary of the plot: spoiler alert

Julia is an art restorer restoring a picture of two men playing chess as a woman watches. X-rays show a hidden inscription, in Latin: Quis necavit equitem: Who killed the knight? 

She goes to see art historian (and ex-lover) Álvaro; he identifies the people in the picture and points out that one was already dead. Art dealer Menchu tries to negotiate herself a larger percentage of the sale on the basis that this discovery will increase the value of the painting. She and Julia, with Julia's ex-guardian César, are trying to work out who killed the knight and waiting for Álvaro but he sends documents instead.

César and Julia go to a chess club and recruit expert player Muñoz who proposes to play the game shown in the painting backwards to discover who captured the white knight.

The police interview Julia in connection with Álvaro's death. Was it accident? But he died before he sent the documents. Suspicious!

César gives Julia a gun to defend herself.

Muñoz solves the mystery of who killed the knight. But now Julia discovers a card giving a further move and she and Muñoz realise that the game is now being played forward and that 'capturing'; a piece means a murder. And Julia, the white queen, is under threat. And she seems to be followed by a blue Ford.

While she is at the antique market, Julia's car is tampered with and another card is left. She and César see the blue Ford and attack it, Julia with the pistol. It’s the police. They have been tailing her 

The card Julia found has further moves in the game which they analyse with Muñoz.

Menchu has got wasted in a night club. Julia collects her in a taxi and takes her back to her flat. Next morning Julia goes out and while she is away from the flat, Menchu is murdered (there's another card left by the body, with yet further moves) and the painting stolen. 

The police arrest Menchu's boyfriend, gigolo Max, who tells Julia that Menchu planned to steal the painting but it was obviously taken by the man who murdered her.

Julia is working late in the restoration area of the Prado when she gets a phone call telling her to go to Room 12 and look at the painting by Brueghel the Elder called The Triumph of Death. There’s another card with more moves.

Julia and Muñoz go to confront the murderer. Muñoz plays against the murderer to the end of the game; he wins. The murderer explains how (and why) the crimes were committed. 

"A Place Called Winter" by Patrick Gale

 

Can Harry, a gentleman with an independent income, reinvent himself as a farmer in the Canadian prairies?

Harry Cane is living off his inheritance when he meets and marries Winifred. But after his affair with another man comes to light he is forced to make all his money over to his wife and young child and leave them to start a new life in the Canadian wilderness where a government scheme means that he will be given 160 acres if he lives there and farms it for three years.

That sounds difficult enough but to add challenge there is Troels, a villain if ever there was one, who crops up from time to time.

This story is alternated with another in which Harry is receiving psychiatric therapy in a community of other mental patients, most who seem to be thus diagnosed because of their homosexual tendencies including Bruno a "mannish" woman and Ursula a cross-dressing Cree Indian. This story is clearly in the future of the other but Harry's mental state means that no spoilers are given ... until the half-way point when, in a dramatic twist, we discover something that sent me back to the other story agog to discover what precisely had happened.

Both stories are told in the third person and the past tense and exclusively from Harry's point of view. The pacing is classic four-part with turning points at the 25% mark (Harry is exposed as homosexual and forced to quit England), the 50% mark (the dramatic revelation mentioned above) and the 75% mark when the villain does something unspeakable. But there's plenty of excitement elsewhere and the reader is in for a roller-coaster of tension and emotions, especially towards the end.

There are some great characters. It is necessarily a well-rounded portrait of protagonist Harry but Petra and Ursula/Little Bear were complex and well-developed. There were delightful cameos of the minor characters such as Jack, Winnie, and Mrs Wells. Troels was perhaps a bit too bad to be true but he too had his complexities which were fascinating to explore.

It's also one of those historical novels which use multiple details to immerse the reader in the period. If you want to appreciate the problems involved in farming virgin prairie, this will inform you. This creates a great deal of verisimilitude which helped me to believe that soft, leisured Harry just might have a chance at becoming a farmer so I was eager to keep reading. 

All of which underlines the novel-writing skills of Patrick Gale.

And it's based on the true story of the author's great-grandfather!

Selected quotes:

• “A cuckoo clock, surely chosen in irony, was chirping ten in the hall.” (Ch 1)
• “God, being English, meant everything for the best, and the life He gave us was full of rewards if only we buckled under and did our bit.” (Ch 2)
• “Pomposity. Severity. Snobbery. They were all masks for various sorts of fears.” (Ch 4)
• “Theirs was an urban tribe whose busy physicality ... could leave him feeling rebuked in his idleness, even as it drew his gaze.” (Ch 6)
• “Musical comedies were Harry's idea of Hell. He disliked ... the tension induced in him by knowing that at any moment a character would burst into song. He liked plays, proper plays, in which you could lose yourself and believe that real things, important things, were happening. He liked bold plays by Shaw, Pinero or Ibsen. He liked his audiences silent and his theatres small.” (Ch 7) Me too! And it's great to meet a gay character who actually dislikes musicals (a far cry from Hilary, the protagonist of Gale's Kansas in August, who spends his life as if he were in a musical). But Harry hasn't yet discovered, or acknowledged, his homosexuality.
• “Slim-hipped, ostentatiously flexible creatures who inexplicably chose to ape girls rather than exploit as men the advantages fate had awarded them. ... They gave every impression having emerged, fully formed, from eggs, as brittle as the waxy shells they had discarded.” (Ch 7)
• “The suggestive seaside smell ... in which something was added to the usual musk of a man and not yet clean.” (Ch 8)
• “His progress was as slow as forgetfulness.” (Ch 15)
• “She believed the key element to patriotism was display; that it was all about being seen to support a cause, being seen to wave a flag.” (Ch 28)

The epigraph for the second section is: “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” This comes from E M Forster's  Maurice, the novel he suppressed until after his death because of its blatantly gay themes.

July 2025; 350 pages

First published in 2015 by Tinder Press

My paperback edition issued in 2015

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Patrick Gale's novels:

• The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985)
• Ease (1985)
• Kansas in August (1987)
• Facing the Tank (1988)
• Little Bits of Baby (1989)
• The Cat Sanctuary (1990)
• The Facts of Life (1996)
• Tree Surgery for Beginners (1999)
• Rough Music (2000)
• A Sweet Obscurity (2003)
• Friendly Fire (2005)
• Notes from an Exhibition (2007)
• The Whole Day Through (2009)
• A Perfectly Good Man (2012)
• A Place Called Winter (2015)
• Take Nothing With You (2018)
• Mother’s Boy (2022)

A detailed synopsis of the plot: spoiler alert!

It opens in a mental asylum where Harry is being forced into a bath to 'calm him down'. But then he is selected by Dr Gideon Ormshaw to go to his house in the country to live in a therapeutic community with other mentally ill (?) patients including Mabel, Bruno “a mannish woman”, Samuel, a black man “Harry assumed was someone’s servant”, a tall Indian woman and other men who look like “the gentlemen of the Gaiety chorus, in London.”

We flashback to Harry's childhood. His father was a self-made man, earning his fortune from four horse-drawn omnibus routes which he then sold to retire to Nice. His mother died giving birth to Harry’s brother Jack when Harry was 4. The lads were packed off to boarding school first on the south coast and then Harrow, when they were five. Jack thrives, being handsome and sporting, Harry is bullied.

After school, Jack decides to become a vet. They live together in bachelor lodgings in London. When Harry dies he inherits all the money (except for a house in Nice left to a Frenchwoman) but supports Jack through college.

Jack and Harry meet two sisters, Georgina and Winifred Wells, daughters of a now deceased solicitor, who live with their mum and four younger sisters and two of their three brothers, Robert and Frank. Harry falls in love with Winifred.

Winifred and Harry are living in Herne Bay with a baby, Phyllis, (and a nursemaid) having had a honeymoon in Venice where she admitted that she had previously been in love with Tom Whiteacre whose father had owned a department store (so he was ‘in trade’ so the family prevented it).

Frank comes to see Harry. Having advised him to invest in a ‘sure thing’ he now admits it has crashed. Harry has lost a third of his money. 

Jack elopes with Georgina. Everyone is okay with it.

Third daughter Pattie comes back from her Belgian convent (because of the family’s financial problems) and joins the chorus of the Gaiety Theatre, acquiring a rich ‘admirer’ called Notty (because he’s not quite an earl, being the third son).

Harry meets the gentlemen of the chorus and rather despises their effeminacy. But one of them, a masculine man, Hector Browning, offers him lessons in elocution to cure his stutter. But when he goes to Browning's house he ends up in bed with him.

They are lovers for a year before Robert finds out. Harry is told to make over his property to Winnie and leave the country. Harry decides to emigrate to Canada taking advantage of the Canadian government's offer of 160 acres of free land to farm in return for partial residency and working the land.

On the ship, surprisingly not seasick, he meets Troels Munck, a Dane.

A single chapter in which Harry realises that the Cree Indian woman called Ursula is a young man dressed as a woman. The Cree respect 'two-souls': men who identify as women and vv. Christians don't. 

Troels and Harry travel to Moose Jaw where Harry will learn how to farm by becoming farmhand to Mr Jorgenson, a relative of Troels. On the night before they reach the farm, Troels rapes Harry.

Harry learns to farm and slowly the Jorgenson's start to respect him. 

Winnie writes to ask for a divorce (on the grounds of desertion) so she can marry her first love. Harry agrees. 

He gets a letter from Jack who has found out why Harry went abroad. Jack breaks communications. 

After a year as a farm hand he travels to Winter with Troels and registers his claim for a parcel of land. 

Back in Bethel, Harry drives into town with Ursula who dresses as a young Cree Indian man called Little Bear. Littel Bear is psychic and asks Harry about “the man you killed.” This revelation is at the 55% mark.

Harry buys supplies then drives out with Troels to his new farm. They meet Petra Slaymaker, the neighbour. She knows Troels: small world! It’s clear she doesn’t like him.

Harry works hard and makes some progress, planting wheat. Then he develops a fever. Petra, who trained as a nurse, and her brother Paul look after him on their farm. He gets better. Paul and Harry go skinny-dipping and have sex.

Petra tells Harry Paul, back in Toronto, had an affair with Edward ‘Teddy’ Crosbie who then attempted suicide but was discovered by Troels. Hence their flight into the prairies.

The threshing gang arrives, Troels among them. Troels rapes Petra.

Petra takes Harry to the Cree encampment to tseek an abortion. Harry, learning that Petra is pregnant, proposes marriage. They marry and the baby, a girl called Grace, is born. 

War is declared. As farmers they are an essential industry and protected workers but at the railway, Paul and Harry encounter a recruiting sergeant: Troels. Shortly afterwards, Paul receives a package addressed to ‘Paul Slaymaker Esq, Coward and Bugger’ and filled with white feathers.

Paul runs away and enlists. Petra  receives notice that he is missing in action. 

At the homecoming parade, Harry meets Troels again who was ‘retired early’ because of illness. When he gets home to Petra and Grace, he finds Troels already there, eating at his table, Grace on his lap, Petra, terrified, in the corner.

Harry and Troels fight. Troels is on top and tells him he is going to kill him, then rape and kill Petra and then ‘your daughter’. He starts to strangle Harry. Then Troels collapses on top of Harry. Harry takes advantage of the unconscious Troels, drags him to the pond and drowns him.

Going back inside, Petra tells him that Grace has the Spanish influenza.

Grace dies. Harry buries her on the farm and Troels in a shallow grave off the property, next to the road.

Back in Bethel

Dr Ormshaw tells Harry that he was “apprehended on a train heading west from Winter” displaying “lewd behaviour towards a group of returning soldiers, and uncontrollable weeping” and asks whether he mistook a soldier for Paul; Harry can’t remember.

Ursula takes Harry on a walk to a place where sometimes Cree camp, she lights a fire and gathers a plant which they chew. It is a hallucinogen. He remembers the railway carriage and thinks he sees Jack and Paul. He hugs them but it isn’t them. Then he hears Troels explain that he had a fever which weakened his heart which was why he was recruiting rather than fighting.

When he awakes, Ursula has disappeared. He finds her. She has hung herself from a tree. Her cuts her down and revives her. He carries her back to Bethel.

Gideon sends Ursula back to the asylum and, declaring Harry cured, gives Harry the money to go home.

Winter is busy, although the war and the flu have removed many of the men and women, leaving children and grandparents. At the store he meets Paul. Paul lost a foot and was taken prisoner and treated by the Germans. He had returned home about a week after Harry, having buried Petra with Grace, had left. That was ten months ago but Paul has been keeping the farms going.

They go home together.

"The Appleby Files" by Michael Innes

 

A collection of short stories, mostly murder mysteries solved by the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir John Appleby. My dad was called John Appleby. But he didn't belong to quite that level of society. Sir John is a connoisseur of claret and takes guests to his London club. He goes trout-fishing. He and his wife, Lady Judith, visit stately homes; one of them usually knows the owners. His son Bobby wrote a successful anti-novel. This sort of thing might have gone down well when the 'Appleby' series started in 1936 (he appears in at least 20 novels), but by 1975 it looks decidedly dated. Furthermore, the stories are mostly too short to allow a proper deployment of clues and red herrings. 

There is a certain amount of nostalgia: I too remember the days when currency restrictions meant that a Briton holidaying in France was only allowed to take £50 plus £15 in cash. Per person but even so it made things tight.

I have read at least one of the novels (Hamlet, Revenge!) but it was a long time ago. 

Michael Innes also write critical books and literary novels under his real name J I M Stewart.

Selected quotes:

• "What the old lady must look out for is and adolescent girl - preferably of worse than indifferent education, and necessarily of hysterical temperament. If poltergeists exist, it's almost invariably when some such young person is around." (Poltergeist)
• "It is well known that poltergeists, in common with other agents of the supernatural, frequently sulk when attracting the attention of persons sceptically inclined." (Poltergeist)
• "'But a philosopher's argosies,' he said a shade pedantically, 'must voyage in distant waters, don't you think? They may return all the more richly freighted in the end.'" (Death by Water)
• "He'd toasted his bottom before the fire of life." (A Question of Confidence)
• "It dates from a time when you put on your warmest clothes to go indoors." (The Thirteenth Priest Hole)

If you enjoy elegant if pompous prose and old-fashioned class snobbery, Appleby is the detective for you.

June 2025; 192 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1975

My edition issued as a paperback by Penguin in 1978

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Closed Casket" by Sophie Hannah

 A classic country house murder. Poirot and Inspector Catchpool are guests of Lady Playfair on the night that she changes her will ... and someone is murdered. Whodunnit ... and how ... and why?

The characters are hugely eccentric. Lady Playfair writes children's mysteries which all seem to revolve around wordplay. Her secretary is a fantasist (Munchausen syndrome and then some). The butler carries taciturnity to extremes. Her daughter, whose fiance is a hugely wealthy pathologist who can't stop quoting Shakespeare's King John, is convinced that the world is unfair to her. Lady P's son is amiable but dim-witted, his wife is horrid. The policeman are hopeless: the inspector doesn't want to be there; his sergeant agrees with anything anyone says. 

I'm not sure that the presentation of the puzzle was quite fair, given that a key witness statement is changed moments before the killer is unmasked. 

Selected quotes:

• “She smiled at him, and he had the strange sense he always had - as if her eyes had picked him up, turned him around and put him down again.” (Ch 1)
• “He was of medium height and build, with thinning grey hair and lots of creases and lines around his eyes, but nowhere else. The effect was of an old man's eyes inserted into a much younger man's face.” (Ch 2)
• “An amiable if a distant smile - as if he had felt chipper about something once and had been trying ever since to recollect the cause of his good cheer.” (Ch 4)
• “All those children you never had ... Lucky blighters, I should say.” (Ch 7)
• “Up here, the wind hit the skin like something solid and hard.” (Ch 10)
• “If you had said all that in Ancient Greek and jumbled up the word order for good measure, it would have been no more incomprehensible to me.” (Ch 33)

June 2025; 371 pages

First published by Harper Collins in 2016

My paperback edition issued in 2017

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel as part of this series:

1. The Monogram Murders (2014)
2. Closed Casket (2016)
3. The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
4. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
5. Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
6. The Last Death of the Year (2025)

"Proto" by Laura Spinney

The fascinating story of how Proto-Indo-European became the ancestor of the languages, including English, Greek and Urdu, spoken by half the people in the world. 

The Yamnaya were a small group of herders on the Eurasian steppes around 3000 BC. This book brings together the linguistic, archaeological and DNA (and sometimes mythological) evidence to show how their culture, their language and their genes spread out across Europe and Asia. We learn about the Hittites and the Corded Ware people, about how Latin came to dominate Italy, about how loan words can tell us when the Roma, travelling from India to Europe, arrived in Persia and when they left. We learn about the puzzle about the constancy of the Irish gene pool. The triumph of the Yamnaya is not necessarily a story of conquest and genocide - their grave goods suggest they were essentially peaceful. The wholesale genetic replacement of indigenous populations might have been achieved because they were herders who lived with their animals and therefore had acquired a degree of immunity to epidemic diseases such as Bubonic Plague so that their germs might have done the killing for them. 

Each chapter deals with a major section of the PIE language group, such as Indo-Iranian, or Baltic and Slavic, and is preceded by a map showing the distribution of these languages. These were interesting but what was really needed was arrows to show how these languages had spread.

My favourite bits were when we were given words in different languages - some living, some dead, some reconstructed - so that we could see the similarities. The author then went on to show how these words could give us clues about the technologies of the speakers' cultures so you can make deductions about how, for example, chariots spread. 

My least favourite thing about this book was the dating. She essentially uses four methods: giving dates, quoting centuries, saying how long ago something was from the present, and stating how many years separated an event from another, already referenced, event. This leaves the reader doing sums in their head, to try to place all these things onto some common timeline. I understand that this might help the narrative flow better but I found this very confusing. The single timeline as the back of the book was too little too late.

I know that it is fashionable to pepper one's narrative with snippets of modern-day anecdotes, in which one talks about the linguist or archaeologist who made the discoveries she is about to explain, but I found these a slightly irritating distraction. 

But overall this was a fascinating and brilliant enlightenment of prehistory.

Selected quotes:

• “One view ... is that language ... was invented in the deserts of south-eastern Africa around eighty thousand years ago, perhaps by a group of children ... playing a game.” (Introduction)
• “Hotspots of linguistic diversity coincide with hot spots of biodiversity, because these regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages, who don't need to stray.” (Introduction)
• “On average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers.”  (Introduction)
• “Indo-European is ... the best documented and in many ways the best understood of all the world's language families, but it also drags the most outdated intellectual baggage behind it. It's like the star patient of a tail-coated nineteenth century doctor, hauled out woozily for public display, underwear slipping off its shoulder, feted and abused in equal measure.”  (Introduction)
• “Languages broadly reflect the cultures with which they are associated, because people tend to have more words for the things that matter to them.”  (Introduction)
• “Migration ... drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages.” (Introduction)
• “Genes and languages are transmitted differently.”  (Introduction)
• “Water rolled over that giant weir with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls, triggering a tsunami that surged through estuaries and lagoons and flooded an area the size of Ireland.” (Ch 1)
• “People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.” (Ch 2)
• “Most European men alive today ... carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.” (Ch 3)
• “Groups of Indians who speak languages descended from Sanskrit today typically carry more steppe ancestry than those who speak non-Indo-European languages. ... The traditional guardians of the holy texts, the Brahmins have more steppe ancestry than other social groups.” (Ch 6) 
• “The percentage of the Globe population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent. Refugees ... on average ... account for ... ten per cent ... of that three per cent.” (Conclusion)
• “Richard the Lionheart ... probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan.” (Conclusion)
• “Elizabeth the First ... helped English do away with the double negative ... and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.” (Conclusion)
• “Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. ... The most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”  (Conclusion)
• “The past is a lighthouse not a port. (Russian proverb)” (Conclusion)

Fascinating and enlightening.

June 2025; 275 pages

Published by William Collins in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

 

"An Imposter in Shetland" by Marsali Taylor

This brilliant book has all the usual hallmarks of a Cass Lynch murder mystery. Cass is now mate on a small training yacht taking a party to remote Hebridean island St Kilda where one of the customers, an influencer, disappears. After the cruise is over, another of the customers is found murdered. There is sailing, Cass is imperilled, and there is a denouement in which she solves the mysteries. We have the usual crowd: Gavin the policeman boyfriend and wise old Magnie who speaks broad Shetlandic, Cat and Kitten and Julie the ketling, pre-school (but no longer peerie!) Charlie, Inga and Freya. There's even a cameo appearance from Anders!

There are the features we have come to expect. One of the many delights of a Marsali Taylor book is the use of Shetlandisms which add a touch of colour to the vocabulary. If you can't guess what they mean, there is a glossary at the back, but usually they are obvious from the context, as in "the benkled nose from rugby in his youth" (Ch 1). See what I mean? What a wonderful word: 'benkled'. So expressive!

Another wonderful feature of the books is the occasional insertion of descriptive passages which make me long to visit Shetland (despite the apparently high crime rate):

• "It was two and a half months since I’d been home. Shetland had gone from the first summer green to high summer, with the wildflower verges flecked orange and yellow, cream and rose-pink, and the lambs ignoring their mothers to charge around like mad things. There was the first tinge of purple in sheltered hollows of the heather hills, and the sky was a beautiful bright blue." (Ch 7)
• "The hills of Clousta and West Burrafirth were hazed blue with the warmth of the day; the cliffs of Muckle Roe shone fire-orange before us." (Ch 9)
• "Here, the only sound was the sea mouthing pebbles on the shore and half a dozen dinner-jacketed shalders peep-peep-peeping in the park above it. The sea reflected the blue sky, the daytime moon wavering in the water, a pale half-disk like a wisp of cloud." (Ch 12)
• "It was a bonny, bonny night. The heavens were spread out above us in their sequin glory." (Ch 18) Sequin!

As usual, each chapter is headed with tide times but in this book we have the additional delight of Shetland sayings as epigraphs, such as:

• "Dir nedder Voar nor Hairst noo. A comment on modern farming practices; there’s neither seed time nor harvest. Sometimes applied to [changing patterns of] weather." (Ch 3)
• "Hit’s no for da kyunnen’s göd ta be ower cosh wi’ whitterets [Literally, It’s not good for the rabbit to be too friendly with stoats]: Innocent people should not become too closely involved with shady characters." (Ch 13)
• "Da auld cock craas an da young ane learns: Youngsters pick up the habits and manners of their elders" (Ch 15)

Same old, same old? Not at all. This is a formula which doesn't grow old and 'Imposter', the thirteenth in the series, is told with such brio that it is one of the best. The pacing is perfect: the murder occurs almost exactly at the 50% mark. The moments of high tension are perfectly interspersed with periods of relative calm, as characters and relationships and developed and scenes are set, but we never lose sight of the story. There are three moments when Cass is in mortal danger, one of which involves an exciting rooftop chase. There is a very humorous chapter when Cass is having a makeover. This is a very well written book indeed.

Selected quotes:

• "Our decorative latecomer might turn out to be the ill-natured cow that breaks up a byre" (Ch 1)
• "There was a French proverb, one who loves, and one who lets themself be loved." (Ch 6)
• "Shetland reality wasn’t floating around in diaphanous dresses, it was putting on a wool gansey and a jacket to go for a sail even in the height of summer." (Ch 8)
• "An otter bobbed up twenty metres off, took a deep breath and bobbed under again. I imagined a starfish refusing to be dislodged from its rock and waited until the round cat’s head reappeared. On the fourth time, the head tilted back with something pale waving in its jaws. A crunch echoed upwards." (Ch 12)

A great read!

June 2025

Published by Hachette in June 2025

I read the kindle version

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

This is the thirteenth novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The books, in order, with alternative names, are:

• Death on a Shetland Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders (Buried in a Shetland Tomb)
• A Handful of Ash (The Shetland Night Killings)
• The Body in the Bracken (Grave of a Shetland Sailor)
• Ghosts of the Vikings (The Shetland Poisonings)
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery
• Death in a Shetland Lane
• Death at a Shetland Festival

"The Story of the Night" by Colm Toibin

 A gay young man in Argentina at the time of the Generals and the part he plays in his country's transition to democracy. 

After his Argentine father has died, Richard Garay lives with his English mother in a small apartment in Buenos Aires. He's gay but timid and is used by handsome Jorge as cover for Jorge's own heterosexual escapades. After the seizure of Las Malvinas/ The Falkland Islands and the subsequent defeat of the Argentine military, Richard is introduced to CIA operatives Donald and Susan and becomes a sort of political gopher. He begins to grow rich as a political consultant and by enabling fraudulent and corrupt practices. Meanwhile he visits gay bars and bath-houses as well as picking up strangers on the street. He meets Pablo, Jorge's gay brother, and they fall in love. But disaster is awaiting him.

It's a tale about the price that must be paid for the loss of innocence. 

It was written in what seemed like a very staid prose style with short, mostly declarative sentences. It's very realistic and quite addictive: I found myself thinking to the rhythm of Garay's interior monologue. 

The are some complex characters. It's very hard to understand the emotions lying behind how the characters behave and their inconsistencies create a feeling of depth. This is particularly true of the CIA operatives as one would expect - they are professionally Protean - but there are unsolved mysteries throughout. My favourite moment was when Pablo appears to vanish from the sauna. This somehow symbolised the novel: that nothing is quite as it seems, and that no-one can be pinned down.

The plot's a bit like that too. Like life, it seems to be just one thing after another. It ends mid-scene. Like life.

Toibin has also written (reviewed in this blog):

• Brooklyn
• House of Names
• The Testament of Mary

June 2025; 312 pages

First published by Picador in 1996.

My paperback edition was issued in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Synopsis of the full plot: spoiler alert

Richard grows up. His (Argentine) father dies and they discover that there is no family money: they can keep the house but his (English) mum has to go to work. His mum takes him to his aunt's place in the countryside; they discover she is very poor. Playing with his cousins they strip and masturbate but when he tries to kiss Jose, Jose rejects him. His uncle refuses to support them and they go home to Buenos Aires. 

At college Jorge, whom he fancies, befriends him, although he too rejects any idea of being gay. He goes on a trip to Barcelona with Jorge. Here they meet Chilean exiles, one of whom has been tortured. Richard pretends to be asleep while Jorge has sex with a girl (and on a later day, another. the one he actually fancies) on the bed next to him. He thinks Jorge takes a long time to come! When they leave, Jorge wants to stay anonymous but Richard, politically innocent, gives his address to one of the girls.

When his mother asks him if Jorge is gay, he comes out to her.

His mother dies. He is now free to meet strangers on the street and bring them home. He goes to gay saunas. He supports Argentina rather than England during the Falklands War. He works as a part-time English teacher.

Following their defeat in the war, the military dictatorship running Argentina is discredited and the country must transition to democracy. Jorge's father wants to stand for president and arranges that Richard works with Donald and Susan, CIA operatives who might help. He acts as a consultant to Donald and Susan and they find him a job escorting economists from the IMF who are suggesting how Argentina can reduce public spending; Richard is brought face to face with public inefficiency and corruption. He then gets involved in the privatisation of the oil industry.

He meets Jorge's brother Pablo and fancies him. They play tennis and skinny dip. On another day, Richard goes to a new gay sauna, a labyrinthine place including a room where gay porn is being screened,  and sees Pablo there but Pablo vanishes.

Richard sets up as a business consultant. Frederico, an oil businessman, offers him an opportunity to make money through a fraudulent contract. Richard refuses twice but on the third time he agrees. He also starts investing in the stock market, becoming rich. 

He works with Susan and Donald with another presidential hopeful, the governor from a remote state. Susan starts having an affair with Jorge.

He has sex with an American and for the first time is required to use a condom: the American fears AIDS. He meets Pablo again and they have sex and fall in love, moving into a posh house. Pablo invites friends from his ten years in California; Matt has AIDS. Richard and Pablo go to a bath-house where Richard has sex with a stranger. Matt and Jack return to California. 

Donald finds out about Susan and Jorge. Donald and Susan return to Washington.

Matt is about to die. Pablo goes to California to help look after him. He starts failing to answer phone calls. Richard is in Miami for work; when he returns he sees that Pablo has moved out.

Richard develops pneumonia and is told he has AIDS. He moves back to his old apartment. At the doctor's surgery, he encounters Pablo; he too has AIDS. They decide to go back to the posh house and live together for mutual support.

"Vernon Subutex One" by Virginie Despentes

 

A collage of stories, written with no-holds-barred, depicting Paris. Shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize. 

Vernon is a lifelong connoisseur of modern music. He used to own a record shop but that has been shuttered. He has survived by selling off his collections and the generosity of Alex Bleach, a rock star friend. But now Alex is dead, the rent is unpaid, and Vernon is evicted. So begins a picaresque as he sofa-surfs around the city, spiralling down towards the streets. But he does have one marketable asset: three video-cassettes containing the last recorded interview with Bleach. A variety of people are seeking these, for various reasons. So Vernon, unknowing, is being hunted through the streets.

Each of the friends he stays with, and others he meets, and their contacts, has a story; these stories are told in the third-person but from first-person perspectives. But by bit, a mosaic is built depicting ... Is it modern France? Is it Paris? Is it just Vernon's subculture? It would be difficult to claim that all life is shown here. There is a porn actress and a writer and a movie producer and a screenwriter and someone who makes her living by trashing reputations on the internet, for a fee. But there are few 'normal' occupations. One lad works in a clothes shop and one character teaches at a university but where are the secondary school teachers and the policemen, the waiters and the concierges, the market traders and the insurance clerks? So it is not a representative cross-section of society. 

What rather took my breath away was the honesty of the writing. There is no fuss here about trigger warnings. The interior monologues include racist and sexist comments, they even include a wife-beater justifying himself; he points out that if he was of higher class he could feel from time to time good about himself but since he isn't “If I quit being violent, when do I ever get to feel like I'm the master? Come on, who's going to respect a submissive pleb?” (256) These people justify themselves to themselves and the author records their thoughts and presents them without comment, presumably believing that the reader will condemn the characters because of what they are saying. She is challenging the reader. “They have no doubts about anything. They are perfectly aware that no-one agrees about anything, something that might prompt them to wonder what to do in the face of so many contradictory views. Far from it, any challenge seems to reinforce their conviction that they are right.” (p 135) And unless the reader encounters the divergent opinions of the characters, how can the reader be aware that those who disagree with their views are human beings who are part of our democratic society and must be noticed rather than swept beneath a moralist carpet. That works for me.

A meandering plot, powered by the question of whether Vernon's recordings will be tracked down, but a warts-and-all portrayal of some memorable characters.

Selected quotes:

• “Madame Bodard liked to talk about her two sons, she worried about them a lot, regularly took them to see a paediatrician in the hope that he would diagnose some form of hyperactivity disorder that might justify sedating them.” (p 8)
• “Kids of this generation had been raised to the rhythms of the Voice in the Big Brother house, a world in which the telephone can ring at any time to give the order to fire half of your colleagues. Eliminate thy neighbour is the golden rule of the games they have been spoon fed since childhood.” (p 9)
• “The drawback of karma theory was that if there was even a grain of truth in the notion that ‘what goes around comes around’ people would have long since stopped being arseholes.” (p 10)
• “He dressed like a Playmobil figurine in his Sunday best.” (p 21)
• “Vernon does not have the attention span to be a [sic] truly depressed.” (p 84)
• “Arousal is a pulsating in the groin, love is a weakening in the knees.” (p 87)
• “Not only is Sylvie negative like a fine drizzle that can chill you to the marrow, she can quickly become nasty when roused.” (p 130)
• “Infobesity.” (p 137) What a wonderful word!
• “Deborah had a heart like an artichoke - ‘a leaf for anyone, but a meal for no one’.” (p 159)
• “This girl wanted to create a book that would be like a cathedral in the sky, she would probably end up delivering a plywood shed.” (p 178)
• “Success is like beauty, there's no arguing with it, it is what it is. And it strikes where it strikes.” (p 179)
• “Why bother educating people who are surplus to the job market?” (p 197)
• “Preserving one's charm while losing one's looks is an equation that rarely balances.” (p 208)
• “Hetero douchebag type, smug, confident in his opinions, spewing hoary old cliches yet convinced he's just invented the wheel.” (p 220)
• “Facing the toilet, he pauses for a moment, which is more pressing - throwing up or diarrhoea? He has to choose. It has often occurred to him that, in a more civilized world, it would be possible to sit and lean forward, thereby relieving yourself in both senses without having to change position. People who design toilets clearly do not drink enough, they don't take account of crucial everyday situations.” (p 237)
• “He has a sneaking admiration for rockers, the way they managed to go straight from juvenile to senile without pausing at mature.” (p262)
• “After his death, everything imploded. At first, the protagonists remained standing. Dried husks filled with ashes.” (p 275)
• “The enemy was never going to be minimum-wage workers.” (p 307)

This is the first volume of a trilogy. Is it a rewrite of Dante's Divine Comedy?  Is this the inferno? The epigraph "non omnis moriar" means 'not everyone will die'. 

June 2025; 351 pages

First published in French  by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle in 2015

This translation by Frank Wynne issued in a paperback edition by MacLehose Press in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God