State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Of all the memorable scenes in Ann Patchett’s extraordinary outsiders-in-the-Amazon novel State of Wonder, the passage in which a small boy fights an anaconda might be the most brain-searing. As the protagonist, Dr Marina Singh, struggles to pull the snake from his body as it slowly squeezes away his life, the tail begins “to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her.”

But then, it’s hard to pick just one: it’s a tale in which a Caesarean section is performed on a septuagenarian, and deep in a jungle alive with mosquitoes, a tribe lives free from malaria. That it all makes perfect sense, could be no other way, is testament to Patchett’s inventiveness and dexterity as a storyteller.

The boy in question is Easter, a deaf-mute abandoned by his tribe who has fetched up with the enigmatic, brilliant Dr Annick Swenson, like Marina an employee of pharmaceutical company Vogel. Eight years ago Swenson ventured into the wilds of Brazil to uncover the secrets of a hyper-fertile tribe, and she is yet to present her results. Increasingly impatient, Vogel has dispatched one Dr Anders Eckman to retrieve her, but as the novel opens, Marina receives a letter from Swenson announcing his death from fever.

Stricken both for herself – she and Eckman shared a laboratory for years – and for his wife and sons, and seeking respite from a tentative relationship with another, older colleague, Marina takes over Eckman’s mission to lure Swenson back.

The title may refer to many facets of this treasure-chest of a story: the boundless mysteries of this Amazonian settlement and the fecund Lakashi; the professional obsession that drives Swenson to subject herself to experimentation; the dream-state, a mixture of horror, fear, fascination and joy, that characterizes Marina’s experience in the jungle; and the reader’s absorption in a story of incomparable majesty.

Swenson’s two areas of research are counterpoints: her discoveries about the reasons for the prolonged fertility of Lakashi women (Marina is confronted by the sight of a heavily pregnant 70-something on more than one occasion, and the Lakashi birth rate is five times that of other tribes in the region) will be of enormous value in the West, where infertility is on the rise in some demographics.

Meanwhile, what this research has revealed about the unique local flora leads Swenson to discover an apparent natural inoculation against malaria, still a widely fatal disease in many tropical developing countries.

Patchett’s mastery of a world in which many writers have stumbled is perhaps the most notable aspect of this deeply impressive work. State of Wonder, in theme and nature, is subject to comparison with Joseph Conrad’s seminal Heart of Darkness, but its feminine perspective and distinctly 21^st-century sensibility are among many marked differences between the two.

She creates heart-wrenching scenarios that are neither melodramatic nor unempathetic, merely human. The idiosyncrasies of the Lakashi are presented as no more peculiar than that of Swenson, and watching the latter’s impenetrable cloak fall, her secrets surface, is thrilling. As if infused with the seemingly magic plants she describes in her story, Patchett has put the human condition under a microscope and emerged with a novel of lasting greatness.

4 / 5 stars: A tale of the unexpected, told by a virtuoso.

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Daughters of Rome by Kate Quinn

The Year of the Four Emperors was one of the most messily eventful in a Roman regime that never had qualms about the gratuitous shedding of blood (but then, who ever heard of a squeamish empire?).

Such historical drama cries out for creative representation, and the latest comes in the form of Daughters of Rome, a prequel to California native Kate Quinn’s first novel Mistress of Rome. Where that tale was set during the 15-year reign of Domitian (who when he appears late in Daughters of Rome is depicted as favouring a Caligulan style of personal relations), this addresses the blood-soaked instability of June 68AD to December 69AD, when first Galba then Otho, Vitellius and finally Vespasian seized the title of Caesar.

And seize they did. In Quinn’s Rome, assuming the precarious position of emperor is the outcome not of merit but of skill in the game of daggers at dawn. It is hard to avoid pondering the parallels with modern-day corporate warfare – the likes of Michael Eisner would probably find a lot more to identify with in the character of Piso than he would care to admit.

Piso is the beloved, kindly and ambitious husband of the eldest of the titular ‘daughters’, 24-year-old Cordelia Prima. Her younger sister, the self-pitying schemer Cordelia Secunda, goes by the nickname Marcella. Cousins to the elder women are Cordelias Three and Four, known as Lollia and Diana.

Lollia’s superficial flightiness disguises a core of steel common to all the women, each of whom is one marriage or stab-wound away from the seat of the empress. At 19, Lollia is on her fourth marriage and prefers the company of her slave Thrax to that of her husband, while Diana, though sought by every well-bred man in the empire, prefers males of the equine variety.

It is the relationships between the four women, and how the ambitions and cares of each prompt them to act for and against one another, that form a fictional parallel to some of the most unpredictable months in human history. And in a useful footnote, Quinn explains which of her characters actually existed, which historical events are real to history, and where dates were conflated or fudged for dramatic effect.

(Rather sweetly, she so admired the bravery and loyalty of one historical figure that she erases his death on the night of an emperor’s assassination and instead sets him up in a happy relationship with one of the Cordelii.)

Quinn’s writing is vivid and fanciful, and invites comparison with the sober, considered historical fiction of Philippa Gregory. While unlike the latter’s protagonists Quinn’s female characters are mostly inventions, she has the potential to make key events in the Roman empire as lively and accessible for women readers as Gregory has Tudor history.

Indeed, much of what transpires in Daughters of Rome is eerily familiar. The bloodbath that ends the seven-month reign of the first of the four emperors is reminiscent of the famous multi-family assassination scene in another Italian drama, The Godfather Part I – frenzied wailing and gnashing, the glint of metal, blood and corpses. Perhaps there is nothing new under the Roman sun.

2.5 / 5 stars: In this Rome, the women are the warriors.

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We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

The title of Man Booker Prize nominee Linda Grant’s new novel, and the manuscript cover depicting a John Lennon lookalike and his laughing blonde companion lounging in the grass, quite perfectly evoke the nostalgic, frequently languid mood of this story of the life of a couple.

At the outset of We Had It So Good, it is Stephen’s father, an immigrant orphan-turned-furrier, who sets the course of his son’s life; Si Newman “believed his son needed basic survival instincts . . . The weak . . . were prey for the carrion eaters. His own parents, he said, had been turned back from Ellis Island, diseased with tuberculosis, the chalk cross on their backs crucifying them.” Thus the young man is dispatched on a series of maritime expeditions, working as a bellboy on cruise ships.

Though Si thinks like a manual worker, he has reverence for education, and his quaint response to his son’s announcement that he is bound for Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship has a touching authenticity. (Conversely, the truth of Stephen’s future assertion that he shared petit-fours with a university-bound Bill Clinton on the SS United States is a matter of debate for his skeptical offspring.)

Oxford is where Stephen meets Andrea, who becomes the mother of his children Marianne and Max and over the course of their marriage evolves from a plump redhead to a lithe blonde. Though she is, like her husband and children, accorded her own narrative interludes, throughout We Had It So Good she remains somewhat unreadable, as though viewed through cloudy glass. Her opacity may be fitting, for Andrea is a successful psychologist who takes seriously her task of drawing out the problems and anxieties of others.

One target of her professional ministrations is the reticent Grace, a college friend to whom Andrea remains almost inexplicably devoted. Scarred and septic, Grace’s decline and its effect on others, and the slow unveiling of her story over the decades-long course of the novel is one of the riches of We Had It So Good.

Stephen and Andrea’s lives as young parents are canvassed only briefly, in favour of the development of Max and Marianne, who find pleasure and pain in odd places and seem, like their parents, to be islands unto themselves. The young Max is deaf for years before Marianne breaks the news to her oblivious parents, to Andrea’s guilty horror – how could she have failed to notice? Is she a bad mother? Such questions are left to the reader to parse; Grant does not presume to tell us what to think of her characters.

In We Had It So Good, Grant has produced a story of unusual poignancy and depth, and one which treats its all-too-human inhabitants with gentle empathy. She knits together a grief-stricken war photographer, a formerly deaf magician and their scientist and psychologist parents into a realistic family while sketching, separately but with comparable detail, a marriage of unguessable trajectory. It is true and moving and a remarkable achievement.

3.5 / 5 stars: An oddball family portrait.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund

Published in Sweden in 2003, Red Wolf is making its debut in English in the same year that her latest novel, The Postcard Killers, written in collaboration with James Patterson, reached the number-one spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list (making Marklund the second Swedish author, after Stieg Larsson, to attain that position).

Like the majority of the writer-journalist’s crime novels, Red Wolf chronicles the adventures of the tabloid journalist Annika Bengtzon, who, after a brief sabbatical from daily reporting, has opted to become an independent investigative reporter for a major Stockholm tabloid, with a focus on terrorism and its history and consequences.

Having made a few routine reports on 9/11, covered the bombing of a shopping centre in Finland, and interviewed survivors of the Bali bombings, Bengtzon wants to sink her teeth into a knottier, less publicized act, and the (fictional) 1969 attack on the F21 military base near the Swedish city of Lulea proves the ideal case.

Though dual investigations of the incident, in which a fighter-plane exploded and caused fatal burns to a young conscript, were conducted at the time by police and security police, every suspected Swedish left-wing group remained untouched, and the attack was blamed on Russian paramilitary forces.

However, the inability of investigators to penetrate Sweden’s activist underground, combined with the unsavoury treatment of the victim’s family, which was placed under a gag order and denied compensation, left a cloud over the incident which an eager Bengtzon finds all too enticing.

Her hunch about a cover-up appears confirmed when she learns that a veteran journalist in Lulea, Benny Eklund, has been killed in a hit-and-run – days after he published an article about F21 and terrorism. She tracks down a young witness to the incident whose evident terror is justified when he is found murdered in his home a short while later. Bengtzon’s dogged digging goes on, and more bodies pile up.

It is no giveaway to say that subtlety is not Marklund’s great talent – though, in fairness, one never knows what has been lost in translation. Her strengths are structural – the pacing of Red Wolf is top-notch – and in the development of dramatic tension, though here it is a pair of familial sub-plots that snatch the reader’s attention, making the resolution of the F21 mystery the less satisfying part of the story.

You see, Bengtzon is a workaholic with two young children and a put-upon husband, Thomas, who is finding the charms of a sympathetic colleague hard to resist. Separately, Bengtzon’s best friend Anne is drowning her grief over her ex-husband’s remarriage and baby-on-the-way in too much wine.

Swedish crime writing has a distinct flavour, set as it often is in the frozen hinterland of the Arctic nation; more than most crime writers, the likes of Henning Mankell, Larsson and Marklund seem to enjoy taking their reader on a tiki-tour of outlying, snow-bound villages in pursuit of their investigators’ prey. While Marklund’s writing might lack some of the depth and resonance of the others’ work, she has in Bengtzon an appealing and versatile protagonist whose tenacity makes Red Wolf a satisfying Scandinavian adventure.

 2.5 / 5 stars: Stimulating Swedish shenanigans.  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.

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.

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.