"Fer-de-Lance" by Rex Stout

Rex Stout wrote 33 novels featuring his master-sleuth Nero Wolfe and sidekick-narrator Archie Goodwin and this is the very first. Later Nero Wolfe novels include The Doorbell Rang, listed as 66th in the 100 best crime novels by the Mystery Writers of America, and The Father Hunt which won the 1969 silver dagger award from the British Crime Writers' Association. 

It is a sort of hybrid between the classic English whodunnits of Conan Doyle (in which narrator Dr Watson is the sidekick to mastersleuth Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (whose first Hercule Poirot mysteries are narrated by sidekick Captain Hastings) and the more hardboiled American thriller-crime novels. There are one or two lines, such as “I don't know what kind of a career she had mapped out, but I could have worn her not to try the stage.” (Ch 8) or “The corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.” (Ch 11) that reminded me of the work of Raymond Chandler, although The Big Sleep was published in 1939, 5 years after FdL.

The gimmick is that Nero Wolfe is an enormously fat man dedicated to orchids who never leaves his New York apartment so Archie Goodwin, as well as being the narrator, must be the investigator who does all the ground work, enabling him also to be involved in the action.

I was disappointed. The elimination of the suspects one by one rested mostly on their alibis and was pedestrian. The killer's identity was obvious with at least 20% of the novel still to go; the remainder depended on extracting sufficient evidence. More thriller than whodunnit, then, and by no means as stylish as the Philip Marlowe novels. Given how much classic work I have yet to discover, I'm not tempted to read any more.

One neat trick I noticed was the way he inserted references to previous cases (even though this is the first of the corpus), thus adding verisimilitude.

Selected quotes:

• “All lawyers look alike. It's a sort of mixture of a scared look at a satisfied look, as if they were crossing a traffic-filled street where they expect to get run over any minute but they know exactly the kind of paper to hand the driver if they get killed.” (Ch 4)
• “To have you with me like this is always refreshing because it constantly reminds me how distressing it would be to have someone present - a wife, for - whom I could not dismiss at will.” (Ch 5)
• “Though it used all the facts without any stretching. anyone could have said that much a thousand years ago when they thought the sun went round the Earth. That didn't stretch any of the facts they knew, but what about the ones they didn't know?” (Ch 5)
• “Anyone may make a mistake, but ... when a man sits himself up as cocksure as Wolfe did, he had always got to be right.” (Ch 5)
• “A yawn that would have held a tennis ball.” (Ch 8)
• “We were putting the soup before the cocktail.” (Ch 13)
• “Saul looked in the kitchen to make a face at me, as if his ugly mug wasn't good enough without any embroidery.” (Ch 16)

May 2026; 285 pages

First published in the USA in 1934

My paperback edition was issued by Bantam in 2008

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Kala" by Colin Walsh

Fundamentally a crime thriller. A teenage gang broke up after one of them, Kala, disappeared. Fifteen years later, four of them reunite in the Irish town. Then Kala's remains are discovered. 

 It is told in multiple first-person using the present tense. The characterisations are strong, elevating the narrators from what might otherwise be stereotypes (a rock star, a journalist, a cafe worker) into believable characters with whom I developed rapport. This meant that I was concerned to know what happened to them, especially since no punches were pulled I didn't know, when they faced life-threatening jeopardy, whether they would survive. The mysteries of the past (Kala's disappearance, Mush's scars etc) were solved in a nicely drip-feed fashion which kept me turning the pages nearly all the way to the end, the final few pages kept me going because I wanted to know whether at least one of the characters would make it. If you add in the beautifully written prose, this novel is elevated from just another crime thriller.

My only caveat is the plot. Mystery piles upon mystery but the solution requires two of the villains to make more or less unprompted confessions. While the first of these is by means of hints, the second revelation which basically solves the mystery is all a bit 'deus ex machina' and therefore slightly unsatisfactory.

Otherwise this is a hugely enjoyable read.

Selected quotes:

• “There's a turning melt of sky above us.” (Summer 2003)
• “Our group’s like a murmuration of birds, turning telepathically into ever new shapes.” (Summer 2003)
• “Kinlough is a sudden sea foaming up around me, and I am islanded in the grinning churn of Hogan's Square.” (Friday: Helen)
• “I am old enough to stop being afraid of many things. I will never stop being afraid of teenage girls.” (Friday: Helen)
• “Time archived in the lines of his skin.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.” (Saturday: Mush)
• “People are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.” (Saturday: Helen)
• “Life is like this: immense when you are inside it, but manageable from the outside.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “Every bedroom, a laboratory of the self.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “Organs squelching. All that blood. The things that keep us alive happen in the dark, because they're fucking ugly.” (Sunday: Joe)
• “She is acting like she is just another bloody adult. Talking constantly and saying nothing.” (Sunday: Helen)
• “The things that make life comfortable are always unacceptable, if you look at them square on. Someone, somewhere, is always suffering so you can be happy.” (Sunday: Mush)
• “Feels like my body’s made of fucking bumblebees.” (Monday: Mush)
• “The moments when you can say something are just that - moments - and once they're gone, they're gone, and you've added another brick to the wall.” (Monday: Mush)
• “You pretend you're cool but ... you need to read the instructions before doing anything.” (Monday: Joe)

Note:

Apollonia, the name Joe sometimes uses for Kala is either a female name meaning 'belong to Apollo', a god linked to poetry and music, which seems appropriate but unlikely, suggesting a higher degree of classical education than teenage Joe probably had, or the first name of an actress who was the lead singer of the girl group Apollonia Six (which might reference the six members of the teenage gang) and co-starred with the musician Prince in the movie 'Purple Rain'.

April 2026; 406 pages

Published in 2023 by Atlantic Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Cut" by Chris Brookmyre

A crime thriller told principally from the PoVs of Millie, once a make-up artist on films, recently released after serving over twenty years for a murder she didn't commit, and Jerry, a mixed-race film studies student whose accent seems to become more Scottish as the novel progresses. They are on the run across Europe after Millie stumbles across a clue to why justice miscarried for her and somebody tries to kill her. As is typical of the genre there is the mystery of a supposedly-cursed horror film whose negative has gone AWOL, a leavening of comedy in the dialogue between these two mismatched characters, and a secret which must be revealed before the final reel. 

Entertaining.

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe she didn't have a trust fund, and maybe Danby didn't either, but Jerry was damn sure that whatever their fathers gave them, it was more than his. The only thing daddy had given Jerry Kelly was pigmentation.” (Belonging)
• “Jerry had heard it said that there were two types of rich people: smart people who knew they'd got lucky, and lucky people who thought they were smart.” (Belonging)
• “She had dealt with people like Anne for decades: a rulebook with shoes.” (A social call)
• “Everybody dreams of being a starving artist until dinner time” (Blood)
• “Weirdly, after months of imposter syndrome at uni, he was finding it easier being an actual imposter.” (Intruders)
• “It turned out that sourcing condoms was not an issue when a rock band's tour bus was parked outside.” (The Fog)
• “It was like I was searching in the fog, not because the answers lay there, but because the fog looked intriguing, mysterious. But fog is not just insubstantial, it is constantly changing.” (The Fog)
• “Peroxide locks that hadn't changed a Pantone in decades.” (Casting)
• “I wonder if the French have a word for volte face.” (Casting)

March 2026; 404 pages

Published by Little, Brown in 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Dead Simple" by Peter James

 A crime thriller packed with action.

This is the first of a long series of novels starring Roy Grace, a police officer based on the south coast of England. It's fast-paced (the chapters average five pages) and I read it very quickly because I wanted to finish so I suppose you could say it was a page-turner but I skim read because I wasn't very interested.

There were a number of things that disappointed me:

• I like murder mysteries. There was very little mystery. This was mostly because the narrative head-hops between the points of view of many of the characters so we quickly learn whodunnit.
• Except for the character introduced in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel. To introduce such an important character so late without any foreshadowing seemed to me to break the rules of the genre. It felt like a diabolus ex machina.
• Some reviewers have described it as a police procedural but routine forensic work seems to be jettisoned in favour of action sequences: no-one followed up the soil analysis, nobody bothered to enquire about the land owned by the missing person's property development company. The investigating officer seemed more interested in psychics than science. 
• I didn't feel that a single character had depth. I didn't care about any of them which was perhaps just as well given how many ended up dead. 
• The hero's back story and physical attributes were given in a chunk near the end of chapter three. This felt like I was reading the author's notes but it wasn't quite so clunky as when he did the same thing for the villain near the end of the book.
• Given that it head-hops between multiple points of view, the reader very quickly learns who are the baddies - except for the extra villain brought in by the major twist at about the two-thirds mark - so there is very little mystery about these murders and almost no element of whodunnit. Instead it relies on shocking and sensational writing and short chapters. 
• There was also a significant amount of casual misogyny designed, presumably, to appeal to a mostly male readership. I understand that Roy Grace has been celibate for none years since his wife left him and must be feeling sexually frustrated: given that he seems to remember his wife purely for her bodily attributes I can understand why she went. We meet him in chapter 3 when he is driving to meet a woman he has hooked up with over the internet: "Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers." The next paragraph made me laugh aloud, when Grace's interior monologue described himself as "an old-fashioned romantic". What a bizarre and ridiculous juxtaposition. 
• The misogyny even enters the similes: "A one-armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley." (Ch 73) I'm not sure that works for me on any level.

This tasted like fast-food: rapidly assembled, predictable, unsubtle and easy to consume. I prefer to eat more interesting meals carefully cooked to have depth and complexity.

Selected quotes:

• "Misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative." (Ch 1)
• "Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bad sex is ninety-nine per cent." (Ch 68)

March 2025; 457 pages

Published in 2005 by Macmillan.

My Pan paperback was issued in 2019.

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

"Florida Roadkill" by Tim Dorsey

Hugely energetic, fast-paced and action-packed with a large cast of oddball characters, this book starts by relating a large number of violent deaths in a seemingly random order. There was a lot of this and I found it difficult to get interested. But after a while, I started to recognise characters I'd met before and at about the half-way mark I started to understand how things were connected.

Synopsis? Serge and Coleman are on a crime spree with coke-snorting bimbo Sharon. They get involved with a corporate criminals and hit men and cheerfully murder their way across Florida. At the same time, best-friends-since-school Sean and David are on a road trip.

In typical American fashion the prose contains a vast number of cultural references (are Americans really so obsessed with sports and with the details of the food they eat and the clothes they wear?) and seeks to add verisimilitude by the means of lists, eg "He filled it with his native-tourist gear: camera, lenses, extra film, leather-bound journal, gravity-defiant pens, water bottle, the 1939 WPA guide to Florida, coupons, maps, AM/FM radio with weather alarm, a travel-size. 25 automatic pistol and other people’s credit cards." (Ch 24) I suppose this makes the narrative more believable although given this number of murders my disbelief was never actually suspended.

The 'blurt it all out' style reminded me to some extent of Jack Kerouac's free-wheeling prose in On the Road and more so of someone on amphetamines. As well as the graphic details and the ever-more-inventive ways of killing someone, there was quite a lot of humour. This kept me going to the end, although I was already getting bored by the quarter mark (it's all so much the same).

Selected quotes:

• "Ellrod, like all Florida convenience store clerks, had the Serengeti alertness of the tastiest gazelle in the herd. He studied customers for danger." (Prologue)
• "Behind the wheel was twenty-two-year-old Johnny Vegas, bronzed, built and smelling like a whorehouse." (Prologue)
• "In every five thousand dollars of dental work there’s ten thousand dollars to be made." (Ch 3)
• "A party wasn’t really a party unless it was lubricating future revenue." (Ch 3)
• "He employed the Big Tobacco Theorem: Tell reality-defying lies with a straight face. He didn’t consider it dishonesty but low comedy." (Ch 17)
• "Roaming police computer systems was like surfing a secret Internet, except it was much, much slower and utterly disjointed." (Ch 21)

There are now 24 books in the series. I can't imagine how the energy is kept up that long. I was exhausted just by the first.

February 2023

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

"In a House of Lies" by Ian Rankin

 The 22nd Rebus novel!

John Rebus has long retired and has COPD. Ex-sidekick Siobhan Clarke, now a DI, is assigned to investigate the murder of a man whose body has turned up after going missing years ago; the missing person case was investigated by a team that included John Rebus. The baddies include Steele and Edwards, who were also on the original team but are now investigating bent coppers; but are they themselves bent? In fact, who isn't bending the rules? Every officer appears to be compromised in some way, including our heroes.

My biggest criticism of this book was the way in which the final solution was sprung on the reader (though there are some clues). The investigation is bogged down, making pitifully slow progress, the story itself kept going by the inclusion of a sub-plot. Then the soil analysis finally arrives and, following some extraordinarily serendipitous policing involving a chase, the solution arrives. I struggled to find any motive for the accessory. And the criminal? His behaviour during the investigation seemed to me to be totally out of character with his behaviour when the original crime was committed. This stuck-until-you-get-lucky structure may be reflective of real policing but there are certain expectations of a whodunnit which I feel were unfulfilled.

But this is only tangentially a murder mystery. It's really the chronicle of a fascinating group of characters, all of whom have skeletons in their cupboards, and a commentary on corruption and decay in public life.

Selected quotes:

• "Make sure both violence and at least partial nudity appear within the first ten minutes. Fear and desire ... are what drive us." (Ch 11)
• "'What type does Tess go for usually?' 'Sentient'" (Ch 21)
• "George's wallet probably needs WD-40, it opens so seldom." (Ch 21)
• "These days by the time a whisper reached the internet it had become an ill-intentioned and half-formed yelp, a yelp capable of spreading like the more virulent flu bug." (Ch 26)
• "Copy the action of the person opposite and they might begin to sense similarities rather than differences." (Ch 29)
• "Carlton was shaking his head, sniffing and angling his head so no tears would escape." (Ch 50)

This was an enjoyable read but I felt it was unfair to those of us who try to solve the puzzle.

Other Inspector Rebus books reviewed in this blog include:

• A Question of Blood
• The Naming of the Dead
• Strip Jack
• Tooth and Nail: Rebus in London: poor stuff
• Standing in Another Man's Grave
• In a House of Lies

November 2021; 428 pages

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

"House of Thieves" by Charles Belfoure

 New York, 1886. A society architect is blackmailed into helping a gangster plan daring raids on banks and society mansions. The architect's entire family, one by one, discover the thrills of illicit activity.

The author has clearly done a lot of research about New York of that period. Some paragraphs, for example when describing the menus of a society dinner, sound as if he has transcribed his research notes. 

From this situation, the plot development is entirely cliched and predictable. The characters are predictably two-dimensional. Complex human emotions are described in a few definitive sentences (we are told, repeatedly, that George's gambling problem is a sickness). The amorality of the story is immense: bit parts are killed off in a few sentences and, although the architect is said to suffer remorse and horror about the murders he witnesses, the reader doesn't feel that. The entire story is plot driven.

And the plot is predictable, repetitive and boring. There's a heist. There's another heist. And then another. There's an informer. The architect's brother is a policeman.  There is gambling, drinking, prostitution, pick-pocketing ... There are society balls (and, of course, rigid moral codes: these are regarded as straight-jackets against which the crime spree seems like entrepreneurial free enterprise). This is a story that has been written many times before. 

Not my sort of tale.

July 2021; 413 pages

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

"A Fatal Facade" by Linda M James

This fast-moving thriller involves murder, religious obsession, fine art, jazz, sex, drug smuggling, prostitution, and the tabloid press. When a playboy and art collector is found dead, ex-DCI Jack suspects foul play. But few of the people involved are what they seem and the crime can't be solved until all of the multiple interconnections have been unravelled. 

It's told from the multiple perspectives of many of the people involved, jumping backwards and forwards in time in a no-frills style and short chapters which really kept the pace up; I read it in a couple of evenings. It has all the classic ingredients of the genre and some bonus features. I particularly liked the fact the the investigator-protagonist was not an alcoholic loner but a happily married man with a son: his family problems stemmed from his wife's terminal illness and made him seem thoroughly human as a result. I also loved the vivid and realistic description of the disposal of a body: "She had to find the strength to get the body into the car. She had to! Her Lexus was parked outside the kitchen; she started dragging the body again. It took her another half-an-hour to reach the kitchen door. She sat down at the kitchen table to rest and thought how she could lift him into the car. The boot was high. It was impossible!"

Other great moments included:

• "If Alan was a plant, he’d be ivy, Jack thought. Strangling everyone with ambitious tenacity." (Ch 1)
• "a face so crumpled it looked as if people had been drying their hands on it." (Ch 3)
• "watching the greedy sea gobbling up the shore" (Ch 6)
• "Had men falling at my feet all the time. Most of them were drunk, of course." (Ch 6)

Great fun to read.

March 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Keep Them Safe" by Sarah Bartrum

 The story of the hunt for a child killer. Partly it is a police procedural, told from the point of view of the lead copper 'Joanie'. Partly it is told from the point of view of a paedophile ('Sid') who is initially a suspect but later seems to be being groomed by the child killer into becoming either an accomplice or to be framed as the fall guy. This is an original (and brave) PoV and some of the best parts of the novel are those which explore Sid's feelings:

• "It was the hair that did it. Flashed gold so bright that it left blue spots before Sid’s eyes. A beacon against the drab cement walls; a distraction from the stench of urine. It shot straight through Sid’s retina and lit up the dark corners of his brain, the parts that were better kept in shadow." (C 1)
• "Sid thought how perfectly formed that tongue was. The colour of a sunset blush neatly curved at the end. Saliva made it glisten as it withdrew behind the lips." (C 5)
• "Sid wasn’t sure which he was aware of first, the buzzing in his pocket or the throbbing of his penis." (C 18)

Sid lives in a flat on his own. He works collecting trolleys at the supermarket. He isn't very clever and he gets frightened. Abused as a child, he knows his feelings for children are wrong but ... There is a level of honesty and reality about this portrait that soars way above the stock whodunnit thriller.

It is also original regarding the copper. Most such books have the protagonist a social misfit or a loner with a past including a fractured relationship. Sid plays the part of the social misfit so Joanie is allowed a wife and a grown-up daughter. The usual job problems (and his wife's redundancy) put this relationship under strain and a substantial proportion of the novel is devoted to exploring the development of the relationships within the family.

In short, this novel is a refreshing take on the whodunnit genre with some genuine originality and three-dimensionality.

Some other great moments:

• "Sid had spent his whole life being avoided by beautiful people." (C 1)
• "They’d end up saying things they didn’t mean or maybe they’d say things they did mean but had never dared voice before?" (C 4)
• "Lying in bed, she let him spoon his body around hers. Joanie was surprised to notice how far his stomach prevented his face from nuzzling into her neck." (C 8) I love this comment on the difficulties of this position!
• "Even now when she had so clearly asked him to bed, he had declined. Why was that? But a part of him knew. A part of him felt that he could no longer make the grade. That no matter what he did, it wouldn’t be enough. He was failing at work, and he certainly wasn’t winning at home. Maybe it was time to accept his lot." (C 10)
• "The wheel was as flat as Mickey’s baseball cap after they’d chucked it in front of that lorry." (C 11)

There is depth and honesty in this novel. A great read. January 2021

You can see a free preview and purchase the book on the Amazon website.

Sarah Bartrum has also written Tracks, which is an even better novel.

This review was written
by the author of Motherdarling

"Friction" by Sandra Brown

 A thriller. The hero is a square-jawed hunk who happens to be a Texas Ranger who saves the life of a judge during a courtroom shooting; this couple subsequently have a lot of squelchy sex, lovingly described. The whodunnit element is elementary with the few twists clearly signalled. Low-lifes are cowardly, criminal masterminds psychopathic, good guys are great and bad guys are nasty. 

Favourite moments:

• A wonderfully minimalist description of sex (an austere contrast to later no-holds-barred-all-holds-carefully-detailed descriptions): "Him. Her. Ignition. Blast-off." (C 6)
• "Rednecks with more cousins than teeth." (C 32)

November 2020; 410 pages.

Another New York Times Bestseller Lists book reviewed in this blog is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

"Clouds of Witness" by Dorothy L Sayers

The second murder mystery featuring aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey; a sequel to Whose Body.

Wimsey returns from holidaying in Corsica to discover that his brother the Duke of Denver has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a house guest who had been engaged to Wimsey's sister Lady Mary. Wimsey is assisted in his investigation by Mr Parker from Scotland Yard who becomes increasingly infatuated with Lady Mary.

A classic murder mystery full of excitement (Wimsey gets shot at one stage ; the trial of the Duke is in the House of Lords).

It was written and set in 1926 and contains some delightful pointers to those far-off days:

• Wimsey undertakes a dangerous flight across the Atlantic in chapter 15 only seven years after Alcock and Brown's first non-stop transatlantic flight and one year before Lindbergh's solo triumph
• There is a radio forecast broadcast on '2LO' the earliest callsign of the BBC (C 15)
• There is a reference to the "exhilarating properties" of "Indian hemp": cannabis was banned in the UK in 1928 (C 4)
• The phrase "broad awake" is used; it is nowadays more normally 'wide awake' (C 1)

One of the difficulties with DLS is that she was so very clever and tended to expect knowledge in others:

• One of the keys which helps Lord Peter solve the crime is that the victim had, amongst his bedroom reading, a copy of Manon Lescaut, a book I had not read at the time of reading this. 
• There are lots of words in French, without translation, which regular readers of my blog know is one of my pet hates. The three page letter written in French is  translated, fortunately!
• Even Mr Parker, educated at Barrow-in-Furness grammar school, knows theology. He tells Lord |Peter at one point: "There are many difficulties inherent in a teleological view of creation." (C 3)

Key moments:

• The first chapter, which sets out the initiating murder, takes up the first 10% of the book. Jane Smiley in 13 ways of looking at a novel states that a novel's thesis must be set out in the first 10%.
• Lord Peter is shot at almost exactly the 50% part; this is the key turning point of the book.
• Another key moment, a key alibi, arrives almost exactly at the 75% mark. At this point we are left with no suspects. But in another few pages Lord Peter has solved the mystery.
• Jane Smiley in 13 ways of looking at a novel says that the climax should come at the 90% mark. This is more or less the moment when the key piece of evidence is read out at Denver's trial.

Other good lines:
"When you flatly deny everything a person says it does sound like contradiction to the uninitiated." (C 9)

According to the Mystery Writers of America this is the 77th best crime story of all time.

September 2019; 299 pages

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

I have set myself the task of reading all the Lord Peter Wimsey novels (mostly again) in order. The ones I have read and reviewed in this blog so far include:

• Whose Body in which my Lord and his manservant are introduced
• Clouds of Witness in which Lord Peter must sleuth to get his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, off a murder charge
• Unnatural Death which introduces another Wimsey sidekick: Miss Climpson
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• Strong Poison which introduces Harriet Vane, a detective writer who becomes Lord Peter's love interest
• The Five Red Herrings; Lord Peter in Scotland
• Have His Carcase: Harriet and Peter investigate the death of a gigolo with dreams

There are also Wimsey books written since the death of DLS by Jill Paton Walsh. These include:

• The Attenbury Emeralds in which Lord Peter, in 1951, recalls the circumstances of his first case, the Attenbury Emeralds, which have gone missing again.
• The Late Scholar: in which Wimsey returns to Oxford

"Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch

A genre fusion novel: a police procedural murder mystery meets Harry Potter. It has a great first line: “It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the East Portico of St. Paul's at Covent Garden.” Then the narrator, a probationary constable of mixed heritage, meets a ghost. Later he becomes an apprentice wizard. Apart from the murders, he also needs to sort out a turf dispute between the rivers north of Teddington Lock, mostly boys under the control of Old Father Thames, and the girl rivers (such as the love interest, Beverley Brook) of the tidal reaches of Mother Thames.

The problem is that murder mysteries require strict rules and allowing magic in disrupts these and demands the formulation of new rules. So time has to be spent explaining why, with his master disabled, Peter Grant the hero can't enter through the front door of The Folly, the magical police station, but can get through the back. And why battery enabled IT devices were destroyed by magic. And I never really understood why Molly's bite led to time travel.

I was bemused, I was bewildered, but I was also bewitched. The novel is saved by a bravura writing performance in which the narrator wise cracks his way to the solution of the mystery and the resolution of the feud. Needless to say, there is a sequel, Moon Over Soho.

Selected wit:

• “Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, ‘Who knows why the fuck anything happens?’” (C 1)
• “London is the pick ‘n’ mix cultural capital of the world.” (C 1)
• “They were loud to the point of constituting a one-family breach of the peace.” (C 1)
• “He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.” (C 2)
• “I knew him by reputation, and the reputation was, don't fuck with him under any circumstances.” (C 2)
• “Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.” (C 3)
• “It ‘s important not to rush the good things in life.” (C 5)
• "The remnants of ancient villages that had grown together like spots of mould on a Petri dish.” (C 5)
• “Anyone watching would have taken us for a pair of feral estate agents marking out their territory.” (C 5)
• “The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles.” (C 5)
• “Like a car engine turning over on a cold morning, I could sense something catching on my thoughts.” (C 5)
• “I actually used the word ‘groovy’ and she didn’t even flinch, which was worrying on so many levels.” (C 6)
• “The dizzying speed of a bumblebee who’d met his pollen quota and was taking a moment to enjoy the view.” (C 8)
• “The trouble with the old boy network is you can never really be sure whether it's switched on or not, and whether it’s operating in your interest or some other old boy’s.” (C 10)
• “A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policeman of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.” (C 10)

June 2019; 390 pages

"Resurrection Bay" by Emma Viskic

A murder mystery set in Australia with a detective who is deaf. This leads to a sensitivity to gesture and body language:

• “She tapped the arm of her chair, and arrhythmic pattern that involved every finger.” (C 2)
• “He'd taught Gaz how to watch, back when they were kids. How to read people's hands and eyes. How to know when a sideways glance meant he should run, when it meant he should throw the first punch.” (C 2)
• “He edged his chair slightly away as he sat down.” (C 5)
• “She picked up a teaspoon and flipped it between her fingers: fast, slow, fast.” (C 12)

It also has its share of wisecracks:

• “Don't get your dick in a twist.” (C 2)
• “I've been so far up those guys’ arses I know who needs more fibre in their diet.” (C 2)
• “No point in reading the instructions - they were written in a language that looked a lot like English, but clearly wasn't.” (C 5)
• “They'd rented rooms in a soulless tower block in order to attract corporate clients, but the lease was calculated with a complex algorithm, which took into account glass and chrome, but ignored square footage.” (C 5)
• “Men are a simple sex, driven by simple needs. Don't overestimate us.” (C 12)
• “The waitress was around twenty, with a fondness for body piercing that had crossed the line from fashionable into ghoulish.” (C 12)

The detective is, of course, vulnerable following a break up with his long-time girlfriend resulting from his refusal to admit he is disabled. It is his partner who is the recovering alcoholic.

• “Strange how things always hurt more the next day: cuts, break-ups, sorrows.” (C 9)

Fast-paced, exciting and well written. Shortlisted for the Golden Dagger in 2018.

June 2019; 278 pages

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• Most Wanted by Robert Crais: a fast-paced thriller set in California
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth: a stunning tale of crime and revenge, of temptation and sin, of evil and redemption set in 1880s Queensland and as gritty as only the Australian Outback can get.
• Snap by Belinda Bauer: a brilliant story about a young lad who, having become a burglar in order to survive, discovers his mother's killer.
• The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernal: classic Chandleresque Mexican noir
• The Closer I get by Paul Burston

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