Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy

Presenting a collection of disparate, unrelated characters and slowly drawing them together as if by magnetic force – typically through a single tragic or unfortunate event – is a vaunted storytelling technique, as tricky to pull off as it is tempting to an ambitious novelist or screenwriter.

Good cinematic examples of this type are the 1991 Steve Martin / Kevin Kline film Grand Canyon, and the 2004 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Crash. In one of the finer novels of 2009, Hearts and Minds, Amanda Craig linked the lives of five people in contemporary London in a series of absorbing but not implausible events.

Regrettably, the enervated Minding Frankie is not in this league. It’s a rare misstep from a scorchingly successful author; translated into 30 languages, Maeve Binchy’s back catalogue of more than a dozen novels has sold 40 million copies, and the cover of Minding Frankie touts her as the ‘world’s favourite storyteller’ (how this has been determined is not disclosed).

The titular Frankie is a baby, born early in the novel to terminally ill Stella, who dies shortly after her birth, and ne’er-do-well alcoholic Noel, who lives with his parents, works in a dead-end job and is gobsmacked to the point of paralysis by the emergence of a baby from a single, drunken sexual encounter after a night of line-dancing.

As Noel reels, his American cousin Emily arrives for a visit, moving in with Noel and his parents Josie and Charles and swiftly proving to be in possession of a degree of level-headedness against which neither addiction nor an unplanned baby is any match.

In a nearby neighbourhood, Lisa has reached the end of her tether in a loveless family home. Chance encounters – a hallmark of Minding Frankie – see her embark on a one-sided relationship with a self-obsessed restaurant owner, and, more fruitfully, cohabit with Noel and baby Frankie, for whom she becomes a primary caregiver.

To ratchet up the dramatic tension, Binchy introduces Moira, a pinched and emotionally starved social worker determined to save Frankie from this mélange of semi-parents – and newly sober Noel doesn’t help matters by teetering on his wagon when faced with any threat to the stability of family life.

A host of supporting characters rounds out the somewhat colourless picture, and in fact, character is precisely what Minding Frankie is most lacking. The baby herself is a mere cipher – she could just as well be a puppy or a temperamental house-plant for all the emotional engagement Binchy has the adults demonstrate towards her. No character is more than two-dimensional, and several aren’t even that.

Where Binchy does display her trademark warmth and shine is in the slow journey to self-awareness undertaken by each major character and achieved with the help of others. Each is in some way crippled or damaged by their past and an emotional deprivation of sorts, and only by letting others in – with wee Frankie as the conduit – can they become fulfilled human beings.

It is as predictable as it sounds, but the Binchyian flavour helps – though Minding Frankie is far from her best work, and constant readers will expect more. The ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ truism can make for fine fiction. Regrettably, this isn’t it.

1.5 / 5 stars: ‘Tis tepid fare from the Irishwoman.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag by Kevin Milne

Vanity is not a character defect that longtime consumer advocate and Fair Go presenter Kevin Milne could be accused of possessing. The title of his memoir, an engaging and entertaining jaunt through his broadcasting career, is inspired by a quote from a Listener review: “In an age of glossy packaging, Kevin Milne is a brown paper bag.”

This is no false modesty on the part of Milne, who has suffered enough slings and arrows in 40 years in television to have long since abandoned concern for critical opinion; as he notes, with the hint of a sigh, when TVNZ CEO Rick Ellis was asked how long he thought Fair Go would continue, the reply was, “As long as it rates.”

There might be a conspicuous lack of sentimentality from the top brass, but Milne’s affection for the show, and pride in what it has achieved during his 25 years as a reporter, is palpable. Chapters with stand-out stories of crooks being nailed and good folk getting their just deserts make for reading alternately mouth-dropping and heart-warming.

Though he registers his gratitude – and surprise – at the results of a poll that put him second on a list of most-trusted New Zealanders, Milne doesn’t assume that the goodwill he has amassed from a quarter-century of appearing in living rooms as a consumer crusader means that anyone wants to know what he has for breakfast.

Thus, the book is heavily weighted towards the professional, with only a few of the 26 chapters touching on the personal – his early life and education, his meeting and courtship of Linda, the Briton who would become his wife, and his family life with three sons and a daughter.

It is, however, the personal that is most engaging, reminding the reader that for all his renown and celebrity friends, Kevin Milne is just a good egg, with virtues and flaws common to many New Zealanders. The flaws, in his case, are a dicky heart (watching the news of Bill Clinton’s heart bypass in 2004 prompted Milne to see his doctor, precipitating the diagnosis of an aortic valve problem) and a pituitary gland tumour for which he underwent brain surgery in 2009.

That made for a good story. Upon receiving the Best Presenter prize at the 2009 Qantas Awards, a category in which he had twice been a losing finalist, Milne took the stage and said of his fellow finalists, sports presenter Andrew Saville and then-Breakfast host Paul Henry: “Sav will be taking this like a man. Paul will be muttering to the person next to him, ‘This is the first time a tumour has ever won a Qantas Award.’”

It is not all light-hearted. Milne movingly describes the effect of the sudden death of his much-admired older brother at the age of 23, and reflects with evident sorrow on the premature deaths of several of his friends in the media world.

But through it all, he maintains a genuine wonder at his own good fortune and the company he has found himself in: describing a dinner with Richard Long and Judy Bailey, he says sitting across the table from them was like watching the 6pm news in 3D, and his rather graphic account of a later incident at Long’s home conveys, again, that lack of vanity. On the page as on-screen, Kevin Milne knows how to spin a yarn.

 3.5 / 5 stars: The engaging memoir of a beloved broadcaster.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Dress Circle

When Mark Twain jestingly said, “Clothes maketh the man. Naked people have no influence on society,” he would have given equal scoff to the notion that fashion would one day become one of the world’s largest industries, generating hundreds of billions in annual profits.

As if to rebuke Twain’s mockery, the handsome volume The Dress Circle makes a sober and detailed exploration of the New Zealand fashion industry from the 1940s to today. Due in part to the effect of societal and economic shifts on industry and on how we dress, and also to the diligence of the authors in recording and depicting what seems like every fashion-related development of significance, The Dress Circle is also a remarkable record of our social history.

The book is the result of collaboration between Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, the director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery and a renowned commentator on design history, fashion and textiles expert Claire Regnault, who works at Te Papa, and Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds.

Each decade has its own chapter, which explores the particular trends and larger social events that influenced the fashion of the time. The 1940s, dominated by war and its aftermath, are the chosen starting point, it’s explained, because that is the earliest period from which New Zealand fashion can be reliably documented.

Later, the fashion landscape was revolutionized by Conde Nast’s launch of Vogue New Zealand in 1957; in the 1970s, the industry was given a welcome boost by the assistance to garment manufacturers by the Muldoon government, expanding markets and increasing manufacturing capabilities; the zeitgeist-dominating 80s TV show Gloss, with its Liz Mitchell-designed costumes; the growth of fashion journalism in newspapers and other mainstream publications in the 1990s.

Designers are given their due in a book in which any budding designer would be well-advised to invest. From mostly forgotten names, such as the 1940s designer Flora MacKenzie (who evolved from designer to brothel madam), to the rise of icons such as Kevin Berkahn, Patrick Steel and Trelise Cooper, the progress of the industry’s creators in the local and international arena is painstakingly parsed.

But all this careful research and recording would be nothing without images, and indeed, the photographs do justice to the authors’ meticulous writings. Each chapter opens with a double-page spread showing a contemporary model clad in an outfit of the period under discussion. The whole book is lavishly peppered with photographs from the time described or of period dress in the fashion collections housed and displayed in Otago Museum, Auckland Museum, Te Papa and others.

There is also the delightful spectre of the ‘hot’ models of each era: names such as Judith Baragwanath and later, her daughter Tiffany, a Patrick Steel favourite, and Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan, who championed Maori fashion as a new Labour MP in the 1970s. One compelling shot shows a wasp-wasted young Queen Elizabeth, the Prince to her left, at the opening of Parliament in 1954, with the caption noting that she wore her Coronation gown without the original heavy horse-hair petticoats.

The production values are, fittingly, at the high end of the spectrum, and Random House deserves plaudits for making the investment such subject matter demands. The Dress Circle is required reading for any fashion aficionado or designer (would-be or otherwise), and a glorious walk down fashion lane for the rest of us.

4.5 / 5 stars: A glorious, glamorous record of New Zealand fashion.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Confession by John Grisham

Days after reading – twice – the closing pages of John Grisham’s gripping new legal thriller about capital punishment in the US, I read in an American newspaper of the October execution of a man in the south-western state of Arizona. The case had drawn an unusual amount of media attention due to a district court’s decision to block the execution because of the possibility that one of the drugs used in the lethal injection might violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The decision was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court in a ruling of five votes to four, and the execution proceeded, maintaining the US’s controversial position as the only developed nation to employ the death penalty.

The tension that would have been felt by actors on both sides of the real-life case, not to mention by the condemned man, may be shared by readers of The Confession, among the most engaging and thought-provoking fiction Grisham has produced.

The set-up: a paroled man with a string of rape convictions, Travis Boyette, walks into the Kansas office of a Lutheran minister, Keith Schroeder. In a roundabout conversation with sufficient obliqueness to plant lingering doubt in the reader’s mind, Boyette implies that he committed the murder of a Texas high-school cheerleader nine years ago; a crime for which another man is about to be executed. Boyette claims to have terminal brain cancer, and that having recently learned of the imminent execution, he wants to put things right.

The minister’s fact-checking reveals that Boyette appears to be telling the truth about his illness and the fate of the condemned man, Donte Drumm, who was apparently coerced into confessing to the crime. Though no body was ever found, Boyette suggests he will tell Schroeder where it is in a bid to save Drumm’s life.

The drama: for a minister, taking a parolee across state lines is no insignificant act. Boyette goes missing, reappears, changes his story, plays ducks and drakes. Even if the pair finally light out for Texas, and Boyette tells his story to prosecutors and news reporters, they might be out of time.

In Texas, Donte Drumm’s ferocious defence lawyer Robbie Flak is pulling out all the stops to delay execution, but is up against entrenched small-town racism (the victim was white, Drumm is black) and a state governor gunning for higher office based on a tough-on-crime platform. Add to this the Texan passion for capital punishment, soberly revealed by Grisham, and Drumm’s chances of clemency look grim indeed.

Grisham has always been a writer of great confidence and considerable dexterity, and here he is comfortable taking his time to unfurl the story across three acts and more than 400 pages. Like many of his 23 earlier novels, The Confession cries out for screen adaptation, and the characters of Flak, Schroeder and Boyette will prove especially rich pickings for ambitious actors. 

Though two-dimensional on the page, Flak is the kind of character that can be memorably inhabited – and several of his encounters with Drumm, whose life has slowly ebbed away in the face of death row’s savage privations, recall the poignancy of the conversations between the two main characters in the excellent capital-punishment film Dead Man Walking.

Regardless of whether Grisham was influenced by this earlier story or simply by the lingering debate, this legal eagle is on song.

3.5 / 5 stars: Grisham at his gripping-est.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book reviews.

And Furthermore by Judi Dench

Upon arriving in Rome in 1998 to make Tea with Mussolini with the director Franco Zeffirelli and a cast including Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin and Cher, Dame Judi Dench and her co-star Joan Plowright headed for their hotel, which, as Dench recalls, “was appalling, but I hadn’t been in [my room] for more than five minutes when the phone rang, and it was Joan. ‘Darling, we’re leaving here; it’s a knocking-shop, I’ve heard two at it on my way up.’

“We went to the Majestic, and [Joan] insisted on seeing the rooms. She was so wonderful; she said, ‘Lady Olivier would like a suite of rooms . . . at least three; because Maggie won’t want to go to that knocking-shop.”

Dropping the name of one’s late, legendary husband in order to secure scarce high-end accommodation at a moment’s notice: Dench’s charming autobiography And Furthermore is laden with such anecdotes, harvested from a stage and screen career of near-unrivalled longevity and depth.

Born in York in 1934, Dench first won notice as an actress in her early 20s, performing as Juliet in a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Old Vic in London.

Her productivity is exhausting simply to read about; by my reckoning (based on a superbly detailed chronology of parts at the back of the book), she has appeared in an average of three plays a year since 1957, in addition to acting in television – including a nine-year stint in As Time Goes By – and 35 films.

A lesser woman would surely have succumbed to burn-out in about 1962, but Dench is made of stern stuff, though she does, blessedly, reveal that after snapping her Achilles tendon in 1981 and taking a forced respite with her family in Majorca, she and her husband, the actor Michael Williams, began a tradition of annual summer holidays (“absolutely essential to get the batteries going again.”).

(The Majorcan sojourn was, however, typically Denchian, in that another guest of the friends they were staying with turned out to be the composer Stephen Sondheim. He was introduced to Dench and Williams as ‘Steve’ and it wasn’t until he later played the piano that the couple twigged as to his identity.)

And Furthermore, for all its many delights, has its shortcomings as autobiography, though readers are warned of the brevity of content about Dench’s personal life in a preface, in which she says she does not consider it an autobiography, given that much of her life was covered in a 1998 70^th birthday book assembled by her friends.

Taken as partial memoir, then, it is close to perfect, and the behind-the-scenes-and-stages information the reader finds herself yearning for is that much richer when it is found. Ironically, perhaps, for an actress, Dench is not given to emotional declarations, and the clear-eyed chapter reflecting on the two years she spent nursing her husband through terminal illness is brought to a moving conclusion with a quote from the director Trevor Nunn’s address at Williams’ funeral.

About what was clearly a very happy marriage, Nunn said that when the couple married, “Mike said to me he was in the grip of feelings beyond any happiness he had ever dreamed of . . . A fine romance indeed.” 

In life as in art, Dench is evidently a woman given to exemplary performance. 

3.5 / 5 stars: The Dame is delightful.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Through Thick and Thin by Gok Wan

The trouble with instantaneous fame is that if no one knows about the hard work, suffering and failure that preceded it, the new celebrity might not get due credit for their rise to the top.

It can help, in such instances, to release an autobiography in which you unflinchingly discuss your food addiction, anorexia, series of unsuccessful jobs, periodic flights back into the arms of loving family and friends, and eventual success as the host of a beloved personal-makeover TV show which helps raise the self-esteem of subject and viewer alike.

This would be the cynic’s interpretation of Gok Wan’s Through Thick and Thin, a raw, funny account of the first three-and-a-half decades of his life, beginning with his birth in 1974 in Leicester and culminating in success as a TV personality, stylist and all-around fashionista.

But the real story cannot but be admired for its candour and sincerity. Wan holds nothing back, and passages such as his excerpt from a food diary, recorded when his eating disorder was at its zenith in his early 20s, make for bracing reading: “Thursday, 14^th March / 1 apple, 1 banana and 40 laxatives. Friday, 15^th March / 2 apples, 1 Slimma soup and 40 laxatives. Saturday, 16^th March / 2 teaspoons of honey, 40 laxatives. Sunday, 17^th March / 1 crisp bread, 40 laxatives. Monday, 18^th March / 1 teaspoon of honey, 50 laxatives.”

To this day, his adoring mother, who was instrumental in his recovery, won’t allow honey in the house.

He recounts with a hard-won clarity how his overeating began – with 2am family dinners after his parents returned from working in their Chinese restaurants; Gok and his siblings would sit down and feast on stuffed peppers, stewed bean-curd hot pot, Chinese mushrooms, noodles, fish, and bottomless bowls of boiled rice.

It was a mixed-race family (Gok’s father is Chinese, his mother white), in which food provided both financial and emotional sustenance. For young Gok, “. . . food came to mean too much to me. It became my best friend; it brought me happiness, warmth, security and comfort.”

By his teens he weighed 21 stone (133 kilograms), and his misery and feeling of ‘otherness’, dually compounded by the dawning realization that he was gay and a discomfiting move to London, away from his beloved family, to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama in pursuit of an acting career, proved the perfect storm. At 20, Gok developed anorexia, losing more than half his body weight in nine months.

His illness and recovery, slowly won as his career – as, variously, a shop assistant, make-up artist and stylist – progressed in fits and starts, is described with careful frankness. Early TV appearances eventually had the fortuitous outcome of How to Look Good Naked – and a star was born, as the show’s premise of encouraging women to make peace with their bodies hit home with a national audience.

However, as Gok writes, none of his colleagues were aware of his history of obesity, self-abuse and body hatred, and “[w]hat no one had thought to predict was how I would react to [the first guest]. [When] she told me that she hated her body . . . I knew exactly how she was feeling.”

Today, he has discovered a renewed appreciation for food, celebrated in his memoir with simple, nourishing recipes intended to be eaten with loved ones. And like Gok’s recipes, Through Thick and Thin is a story best shared.

3.5 / 5 Stars: A memoir with a message.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Cold Shoulder by Lynda La Plante

It’s April 1988 in Los Angeles when a police officer, on duty and under the influence of alcohol, shoots dead a young boy as she sees him pull a gun from his jacket. The ‘gun’, on closer inspection, is a Sony Walkman. So begins the steady unraveling of the life of Lieutenant Lorraine Page, who in short order loses her job, her marriage and the custody of her two daughters. We leave her late one night, drinking alone in a downtown bar.

All of this happens in the tightly-written, unsettling prologue that opens Cold Shoulder, the first book, originally published in 1994, in Lynda La Plante’s ‘Cold’ trilogy. The first chapter picks up Lorraine’s story six years later; we find her older, battle-scarred from living rough and working sporadically as a prostitute, and nearly dead from the combination of alcohol addiction and a recent hit-and-run. Her recovery sees her temporarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, then a rehabilitation centre, where she meets Rosie Hurst, a recovering alcoholic who takes Lorraine under her wing and into her home.

Despite Rosie’s efforts to draw her to AA meetings, the destitute Lorraine is still far from the straight path. On a whim one afternoon, she gets in a car with a john and takes his money, but changes her mind at the last minute. Before she can disentangle herself and get out of the passenger seat, he bashes her in the back of the head with a claw-footed hammer.

Badly injured, she escapes, leaving behind a couple of crucial witnesses. Shortly afterwards, police find the car – with the owner dead in the boot from apparent hammer wounds to the back of the head. The same modus operandi is quickly linked to a spate of killings of young women. It quickly becomes evident to investigators that a serial killer is on the loose, and to the reader alone that Lorraine, a talented investigator in her day, may be the only person who can identify him.

It isn’t long before Lorraine, taking tentative steps toward sobriety, is reunited with her former partner, and the dual plots – police procedural, Lorraine’s search for redemption – fully merge.

La Plante has penned bestselling 14 novels and many scripts for television, of which the best-known are the incomparable Prime Suspects. Cold Shoulder, with its alcoholic-cop heroine (who also features in the follow-ups, Cold Blood (1996), and Cold Heart (1998)) could be expected to draw comparison, a natural curse of having invented a character as indelible and formidable as Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison.

But La Plante’s writing is nothing if not fearless, and the doughty Lorraine Page – whose pain and fear are depicted with often agonizing immediacy – lingers in the mind long after the pedestrian crime story has been resolved. It is not only Cold Shoulder’s denseness, at 470 pages, that precludes its being characterized as a light afternoon read. La Plante’s creation of a striking lead, a woman by turns repellent and admirable, someone who kills a harmless boy and chooses the bottle over her children but is impossible to turn away from, makes Cold Shoulder a transporting experience.

3 / 5 stars: A tale of redemption told by a master.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Masterchef New Zealand The Cookbook: Volume One

The Masterchef model has a pedigree as impressive as that of a Michelin-starred chef: having debuted on British TV screens via the BBC in 1990, the series has been spun off in multiple directions, from a celebrity version to one featuring adolescent amateur chefs. Adaptations have been produced in Australia and in the US, where this year the ferocious Gordon Ramsay will co-host.

Our own edition premiered early this year, with amateur chef Brett McGregor named New Zealand’s first Masterchef. Ratings were sufficiently robust to ensure a second series, now filming.

No celebrity chef can claim that title if he lacks a cookbook, and McGregor’s is one of the first faces you see (after that of the inimitable Simon Gault, a Masterchef judge and Auckland chef-restaurateur) when you open this dense, glossy volume. But beyond McGregor’s foreword, this Masterchef compendium is uncommonly egalitarian.

With recipes from each of the top 12 contestants, and from Gault and several other notable chefs, Masterchef The Cookbook: Volume One starkly contrasts with that other Masterchef book to hit Kiwi shelves this year, Our Family Table, the collection released by Julie Goodwin, winner of the first Australian edition.

Where Goodwin shares her own well-worn recipes, from lazy brunches to one-pot campfires meals and simple home baking, Masterchef The Cookbook is what it claims to be: a book for cooks who are at least aiming for kitchen mastery. The recipe categories reflect what is found on a restaurant menu – nibbles, entrees, degustation, mains, dessert. No chutneys, not a cake or scone in sight. A Masterchef has lofty goals, and is unafraid of chocolate, orange and pistachio marquise with poached rhubarb, raspberry marshmallow and chocolate and vanilla tuiles. To a Masterchef, a recipe containing five mini-recipes, including one for spun sugar, is but the work of a moment.

Chefs rarely view desserts as a fitting test of their talents, and the book is dominated by savoury recipes both light and heavy, from prawn and coriander dumplings to blueberry and goat’s cheese wontons and quattro formaggi pie. Meat lovers too are well-served: beef carpaccio with summer salad, parsnip chips and Bloody Mary shots; beef, bacon and Guinness hot pot pie.

Make no mistake – this is restaurant food, and person inexperienced in the kitchen would be ill-advised to embark on culinary education with Masterchef The Cookbook (though the early ‘how to’ chapters – dice an onion, joint a chicken, prepare stock and other basics – contain valuable instructions for starter chefs, and these sections are well composed).

The distinction between home and restaurant is evident in dishes such as an apple, rhubarb, prune and blueberry crumble pie. Few, at home, would faff around with pastry only to turn the whole enterprise into a crumble – but in a restaurant, or competitive cooking show, that elevation matters. (Every chef wants to stand out – and I couldn’t help but wonder how much the televised competition continued to play out in the process of submitting recipes for this book.)

Masterchef The Cookbook is a fine volume, produced with obvious care and the contributions of many talented folk. It’s best recommended to the ambitious home cook – someone good at adapting and simplifying recipes to their own style and taste – or the would-be restaurant chef. Someone aiming for Masterchef glory might use it as a test of skill.

3.5 / 5 stars: Not your everyday Edmonds.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews. 

Dark Water by Caro Ramsay

I was halfway through Caro Ramsay’s stupendous new thriller before I learned, with some surprise, that it was billed as the third book in the Anderson and Costello series. Crime writers love a recurring protagonist – it gives room to form character arcs and relationships beyond the episodic, potentially formulaic storylines – and some of the best have created heroes that are now embedded deep in the pop-culture consciousness – Ramsay’s fellow Scot Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill, Lynda La Plante’s inimitable Tennison.

The aforementioned characters are, however, notable not just for their forensic and investigative skills but also for spectacular personal flaws. I failed, at first, to note the importance of DI Colin Anderson and DS Freddie Costello, partly because they are just two of more than a dozen intriguing Glaswegian police officers working to solve the mysterious murder that opens the book, but also because any private dysfunction is treated with a lightness of hand generally seen only in the best crime fiction.

Which this is. Dark Water, featuring one of the most chilling prologues I have read, is a gritty, lucid police procedural that maintains a stranglehold on the reader – and more than a few unfortunate characters. The crime committed in the opening passage remains unsolved at the start of the first chapter, and is unearthed once more when, 10 years later in grey, 2010 Glasgow, a crime with similar distinctive hallmarks is discovered.

With a steady hand, Ramsay guides her host of oddbods – the disenfranchised family man Anderson, the sprightly, clever Costello, and a rogue’s gallery of colleagues and adversaries – through a minefield of cold cases and around a merry-go-round of potential, usually quickly-discounted, suspects. She possesses a fine ear for dialogue (a beast of burden for many writers), and her sparing use of dialect serves to enhance rather than distract.

Ramsay has said that she prefers writing about the aftermath of violence, rather than the violence itself, and indeed, the novel is free of the literal, visceral depictions you expect from a Hayder or Kellerman. But she cuts it fine, and her penchant for beginning or ending a scene just outside the violent act, and for having her talented, jaded cops pore over the grisly evidence of brutality, has the effect of heightening the intensity, suspense and sheer thrill of the story.

Ramsay continues to work full-time as an osteopath and told an interviewer she has little time for research, but this is not the only reason she has chosen to set her books in her homeland: she has an acute awareness of how the Scottish weather, which she describes as “black, brooding and chilling”, can be used to set tone and mood.

Given the landscape, she notes, Scottish crime fiction “leads itself to the dark and dangerous”, and she brings this view to bear in the novel’s later action, which occurs primarily in a sprawling country estate of wooded paths, secret entrances, flora-filled greenhouses and a fog-laden lake.

Dark Water is a novel of unnerving precision and narrative weight, and with it Ramsay should be considered for a place alongside McDermid and Rankin as one of the great crime-writing Scots.

4 / 5 stars: Easily among the top 10 thrillers of 2010.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

From The Dead by Mark Billingham

Having established himself in acting, stand-up comedy and scriptwriting, Briton Mark Billingham decided to turn his hand to the minor task of producing a bestselling crime series. He duly did so in 2001, with Sleepyhead, quickly following up with Scaredycat, a 2002 novel with a startling provenance: Billingham based it on a 1997 incident in which he and his writing partner were kidnapped and held hostage in a Manchester hotel room. That event, he has written, taught him that “fear is a very powerful weapon.”

In embarking on a fiction career he had intended, he once said, to model his style on that of Carl Hiaasen, the equally multitalented Miami Herald reporter who has manufactured a stack of darkly comic Floridian crime tales, but found that his writing skewed more towards the serious – and thus, his recurring hero DI Tom Thorne, who first appeared in Sleepyhead, was born. (Billingham has so far published just one standalone thriller, 2008’s superb In the Dark.)

From the Dead opens with a tightly written prologue in which two unnamed thugs burn a man alive in his car in the woods. For the crime, a woman, Donna Langford, has served 10 years in prison for procuring the services of hitmen to murder her husband, Alan, whom she and the authorities always believed was the man in the car, the victim of what became notorious as the ‘Epping Forest Barbecue.’

However, as Billingham quickly reveals, the true victim was an unfortunate patsy dispatched by Alan Langford, a wily and cold-blooded crime boss who was far more than a step ahead of his wife.

With this discovery, Thorne, already frustrated by the acquittal of a man he arrested for the murder of a young girl, is confronted with his latest brain-teaser. If the body found in the car was not that of Alan Langford, whose was it? And where is the real Langford – and have his criminal career and habit of doing away with anyone who inconveniences him abated or intensified in the intervening decade?

The first question is what Billingham spends much – possibly too much – of the novel addressing, while establishing a couple of portentous subplots involving a new colleague of Thorne’s and his rather moribund relationship with a fellow cop, Louise Porter, whose entanglement with Thorne has featured in several earlier novels.

The relationship, which has always been of the on-off type, recently suffered the destabilizing effects of a miscarriage, and the quiet discomfort of the pair, coupled with Thorne’s evident uncertainty as to how to breach the new divide, adds a warming pathos to a story dominated by various examples of human malignance.

But Billingham knows as well as anyone that a crime thriller exists only for its ending – the writer’s job is to deliver a pay-off to make his reader’s eyes widen and justify the past 300-odd pages of slog through unidentified bodies, untimely assassinations and problematic domestic arrangements.

Billingham does so reliably, in an exotic locale, but without the degree of panache that made In the Dark one of the most memorable thrillers of two years ago. Surprisingly, what delivers a greater shock is the unexpected denouement, upon the detective’s return to London – which may well provide the springboard for the next Thorne appearance. It shouldn’t be long in coming.

3 / 5 stars: Decent but undazzling. Click here to see more Easy Mix Book Reviews.