Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” goes the famous line from Anna Karenina, and the Faircloughs, the fractured Cumbrian clan of Elizabeth George’s superb new crime novel Believing the Lie, energetically illustrate Tolstoy’s adage. Secrets and lies make for quality British drama, beginning here with the sudden death of Ian Cresswell, the nephew of industrialist and patriarch Bernard Fairclough, a productive member of the family firm, and, as a child, a resident of the Fairclough home.

Though Bernard and Valerie Fairclough have a legitimate heir to show for their long marriage, Nicholas is a dissolute recovering addict who long ago fell out of favour with his parents and sisters. Though now sober and married, most doubt the security of Nicholas’ abstinence, and some are likewise skeptical of the disability of his sister Mignon, a manipulator of the highest order who relies on her father’s largesse. This leaves a third sibling, Manette, to carry the flag, but she is distracted by regret over the recent dumping of her amiable husband Freddie, who is easily the most normal in the bunch.

Other featured players in a cast of rare richness include Ian’s lover Kaveh, for whom the dead man abandoned his marriage and with it the pretence of heterosexuality; Niamh, the wronged wife acidic with rage and bitterness; Ian and Niamh’s tormented teenage son, Tim; and Deborah and Simon St James, close friends of protagonist DI Thomas Lynley with troubles of their own.

Though an inquest declares Ian’s death accidental, Bernard asks Lynley, sagacious hero of 16 previous George novels, to travel from his London home to conduct a confidential review of the matter. Lynley isn’t alone in kicking over the traces; accompanying him, and soon espying a possible personal sensitivity in common with Nicholas’ wife Alatea, Deborah unwittingly lights the spark that will lead to an explosive conclusion. Meanwhile, a green tabloid reporter is dispatched by his editor to sniff out a tale of money and murder. Whether either are there to be found is just one of the novel’s sombre delights.

In its narrative intricacy and refusal to hew to tired crime fiction conventions, Believing the Lie bears comparison to Val McDermid’s 1999 peerless A Place of Execution. Though George’s work does not address an historical crime, both stories centre on investigators who journey to pastoral idylls to poke doggedly at family and community secrets. And like McDermid’s story, Believing the Lie elevates the genre and its possibilities: the writers delight in the intelligence of their readers and recognize that the ‘whodunit’ can be less compelling than what’s going on besides.

The story skips along at a pace belying its 560 pages. It marries the velocity of a Jilly Cooper novel – truly! – with the gravity of P D James. If this is the standard of 2012’s crop of crime writing, George has set a dauntingly high bar for all-comers. Believing the Lie may be the masterwork of an assured and inspired craftswoman, and it deserves every plaudit it will receive.

4 / 5 stars: A masterful crime thriller; possibly George’s finest work yet.

Click here for more Coast book reviews.

Trick Of The Dark by Val McDermid

With Scottish crime maven Val McDermid having produced one of the best thrillers of 2009 (Fever of the Bone, the most recent installment in her popular Jordan-Hill series), and one of the most acclaimed suspense novels of the past two decades in 1999’s A Place of Execution, any new work is rightly met with heightened anticipation.

In Trick of the Dark, she has bypassed her three existing series (others centre on journalist Lindsay Gordon and private investigator Kate Brannigan) in favour of a ninth stand-alone work. The main character here is Charlie Flint, a leading clinical psychiatrist whose career is in limbo after a murder defendant in whose acquittal she was involved later killed four women. Her love life is equally shaky, with her long-term relationship threatened by her attraction to a life coach and therapist.

This gloomy opening synopsis is swiftly followed by Charlie’s receipt of a package of press cuttings about the brutal murder of a groom at his wedding on the grounds of St Scholastika’s College, Oxford, where Charlie once studied. The victim Philip Carling’s former business partners have been tried and convicted of the crime, the accepted motive being that Carling was about to expose them for insider trading.

The cuttings also reveal that the bride concerned was a young woman named Magda Newsam, Charlie’s former babysitting charge. The clippings, it turns out, constitute a summons from Magda’s mother, Dr Corinna Newsam, an Oxford fellow who habitually appointed her brightest students to the task of caring for her four children while she pursued career advancement.

Charlie dutifully responds, and learns that Corinna suspects the involvement in Carling’s death of Jay Macallan Stewart, another former student-babysitter who has overcome a disadvantaged past to find extraordinary success in business, and who apparently embarked on a relationship with the bereaved Magda very shortly after the wedding. A merry widow? This is what McDermid asks us to ponder, along with whether Corinna’s request for investigative assistance is inspired by homophobia (she and Mr Newsam, a deplorable chap, are devout Catholics), or something more sinister than mere bigotry.

The titular ‘trick of the dark’ refers to a scene witnessed by Corinna many years ago that she thinks is linked to the murder of Carling, and as we learn more about Jay’s past, primarily through passages of the memoir she is writing, suspicion is cast in her direction.

However, the relentless nature of Charlie’s delving makes it wise to reserve judgement – and McDermid, who knows precisely where to invest her imaginative energies, makes only a fairly cursory attempt to lead her reader down the garden path.

In itself, Trick of the Dark is satisfying if unremarkable: the plotting has been done with care, but McDermid seems not to have devoted the attention to character exposition that a reader familiar with her work might expect. Her artful exploration of the painful past of psychologist Tony Hill was one of the best elements of Fever of the Bone, and the absence of comparable emotional substance makes Trick of the Dark a relatively lightweight read. Nonetheless, her skill is such that any fan of the genre would be foolish to bypass it.

3 / 5 stars: Middling McDermid, but still a treat. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews. 

Caught by Harlan Coben

Until a few years ago I was relatively unversed in the crime/thriller/mystery genre, aside from the sedate likes of Agatha Christie and P D James: the modern megasellers (James Patterson, Jonathan Kellerman et al) hovered in my peripheral vision in other domains of the bookshop.

It was Harlan Coben’s compelling 2007 novel The Woods that at last introduced me to the sophisticated modern thriller, in which the reader finds a plot with multiple connected sub-plots, crime depicted in grisly detail, unforeseeable twists, and hard-bitten characters who, despite their seen-it-all-before miens, are invariably shocked by the new chaos they encounter as they lurch toward an unpredictable climax and denouement.

A common feature of the postmodern thriller is the clever use of science and technology – Kathy Reichs, Val McDermid and Karin Slaughter are handy at this – and these days the protagonist is as likely to be a forensic pathologist or crime-scene investigator as a detective inspector.

In Coben’s 17^th novel, Caught, he sticks to his knitting with a crackerjack story that makes a swift take-off. The scene is set with two parallel plotlines that initially don’t intersect – the disappearance of a 17-year-old high school student, and a sting operation by a tabloid reporter who tracks online sexual predators and exposes them in a national news programme.

In the opening chapter, the reporter, Wendy Tynes, follows social worker Dan Mercer to a house to which he has been summoned by a troubled teenage girl. She busts him, but the ‘exposure’ turns out to be less than definite – though there is little immediate evidence that Dan is in fact a child abuser, the repercussions for both Dan and Wendy are swift and calamitous.

Out of a job and still uncertain as to the truth about the social worker, Wendy finds her curiosity further piqued when Dan calls her, telling her he was set up and that they need to meet in person. He summons her to a trailer park in rural New Jersey where he has gone into hiding, and she finds him sporting mysterious bruises and a bad dye job. Before Wendy can learn more from Dan the plot thickens, as the father of another of Dan’s alleged victims storms the scene and takes what he believes to be revenge.

Coben uses this turn in the plot to pose the novel’s key questions: who are the real villains of the piece, what crimes have they committed, and has the missing girl, Haley McWaid, fallen victim to foul play or simply decided, on a teenage whim, to absent herself from ordinary life?

The latter query appears to be answered when the local sheriff’s scouring of Dan’s former motel room turns up Haley McWaid’s iPhone – with the plotted coordinates of a specific area of the local park. A connection between the two storylines has thus been established, and Coben ramps up the action with inspired digging by Wendy, who finds that Dan and his four college housemates have each experienced the destruction of their personal reputation in the past couple of years.

Dan’s avowal that he was a victim now seems justified – but who is targeting the men, and why?

To say more would be to spill the best beans of Caught, which doesn’t rewrite the rules of the crime thriller but more than meets the requirements of fans of the genre and this writer. Coben’s talent lies in pacing and structure – it is harder than it seems to dive between disparate narratives while engaging rather than confusing the reader – and in subtly guiding the reader’s interpretation of each character while withholding just enough crucial data to produce the requisite big bang. Very satisfying. 

3 / 5 Stars: No molds are being broken here, but it’s a pacy thriller from a highly competent practitioner.  Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews

Bleed for Me by Michael Robotham

The tormented, brilliant detective who doesn’t play well with others but has strong views on how people should comport themselves is a character as old as the crime-thriller genre itself. From Val McDermid’s Tony Hill to Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery and Ian Rankin’s alluring new protagonist, Malcolm Fox (with a nod to Poirot and Miss Marple), the best investigators possess a strong moral code and know exactly when the lines need to be blurred – and because they’re cleverer than anyone else, they get away with it.

Joseph (Joe) O’Loughlin is a worthy member of the club, both in biography (separated from his wife of 20 years, Julianne, with whom he remains in love, he makes forlorn attempts to re-engage with her while spending time with their two daughters) and personality (his worsening struggle with Parkinson’s disease exacerbates his natural tendency towards dourness).

Bleed for Me is the fourth Robotham novel in which Joe appears and is a swiftly-produced follow-up to last year’s bestselling Shatter, which saw Joe match wits with a demonically intelligent villain called Gideon Tyler.

Joe’s propensity to allow his work to swallow his personal life to the extent of endangering his family is the primary cause of the apparently irreparable rent in the fabric of his marriage, and it is evident he hasn’t learned his lesson when, at the outset of Bleed for Me, he finds his daughter Catherine’s best friend, 14-year-old Sienna Hegarty, barefoot, bleeding and near-catatonic next to a stream. Back at the Hegarty home, Sienna’s father Ray is found bludgeoned to death.

Sienna, the prime suspect, is taken into psychiatric care – but it is immediately apparent to Joe that she is not the culprit.

Robotham likes to pit Joe against a foe who shares his intelligence but lacks his physical frailties – a virile, younger man who represents the darker aspects of the human condition. In Shatter, he created a memorable villain in the form of the sadistic Tyler; in Bleed for Me, Joe’s well-honed sense of there’s-something-off-about-this-guy-I’m-gonna-stalk-him-till-he-snaps is tweaked by Gordon Ellis, a teacher at Sienna and Catherine’s school.

Investigation reveals that Ellis’s first wife vanished, leaving behind their young son. Yet more probing (Joe is an expert prober who hates to miss a chance to provoke) reveals that the wife’s vanishing occurred at the same time that Ellis began an affair with a student, now his second wife.

Joe’s hackles are up, and when it is discovered that Sienna had a recent pregnancy, he feels certain that he’s pieced the puzzle together – but can it be that easy? And how does a high-profile race-hate trial fit into the picture?

Despite the lone-wolf nature of the best fictional detectives, they are invariably accompanied by a handful of offsiders with whom they enjoy gruff, teasing banter and who swoop in to provide vital assistance or succour when things are at their diciest. Joe has such a support in the form of DCI Ronnie Cray, a memorable figure who brings both humour and humanity to what is at times a grim story.

Few thriller writers rival Robotham for plot and pacing. Bleed for Me thrums with electricity and the rhythm, always tricky in such plot-driven works that build to a big pay-off, is pitch-perfect.

3.5 / 5 stars: One for the 2010 top-thriller list.  Click here to view other Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Blue Eyed Boy by Joanne Harris

Thanks to the Oscar-nominated film of her novel Chocolat, Joanne Harris is now irrevocably linked to Johnny Depp – surely a pleasing thing for any lass. That book spun the tale of single mother opening a chocolate shop in a tiny French village and inviting the wrath of the ascetic curé of the local parish. However, an itinerant musician proved a distraction from her growing unpopularity . . .

With that, readers of Harris’ new book Blue Eyed Boy are advised to let go any romantic notion of what kind of story they might expect to find. She makes a firm departure from the best-known of her previous 10 novels (plus two cookbooks and a short-story collection) with this dark story of a 42-year-old hospital porter who lives with his mother in a Yorkshire village and spends much of his time writing online fiction (‘fics’) for a community of fans, who post comments on his work.

The fics are in the murder-fantasy genre, and it doesn’t take long for the reader to start wondering whether blueeyedboy, the moniker under which he posts, is inventing the tales he tells or simply recording his autobiography in neatly-typed passages.

Blue Eyed Boy is saturated with colour, because its protagonist has synaesthesia, defined in the novel as “a rare condition where two – or sometimes more – of the five ‘normal’ senses are apparently fused together. A synaesthete may experience any or all of the following: shape as taste, touch as scent, sound or taste as colour.”

In blueeyedboy’s case, he has olfactory-gustatory synaesthesia and experiences people and places as colours, smells and tastes. The intensity of sensation provokes debilitating headaches and as he withdraws further into his fantasy ‘fics’, the people around him develop a bad habit of dying in haste.

Into the mix comes another online storyteller, Albertine, and the complex web woven by blueeyedboy starts to unravel.

Harris is clearly interested in exploring the theme of the internet’s dark side – while it opens up the world and enables people to connect with like-minded others, it also gives the more nefarious among us a limitless avenue to pursue perverse ends. The role of the web in modern life is being explored with increasing frequency by crime writers in particular (see Val McDermid’s Fever of the Bone for an excellent recent example), and Harris makes smart use of this everyday tool as a literary device to expose a disintegrating mind.

A wonderful thing about books as an art form is that, unless you have read a work by a given author before, it’s rare to have many preconceived notions. You can approach a book fresh, wide-eyed and hopeful of entertainment and new nuggets of knowledge.

However, it can enhance one’s enjoyment to know something about the person who produced this wee object you’ve just been ravishing, though it’s rare to see anything more titillating in the author blurb than where they live and what they’ve already published.

In the case of Joanne Harris, hers reveals her to be a woman with wit and no lack of curiosity: “Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as: “mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion of the system”, although she also enjoys obfuscation, sleaze, rebellion, witchcraft, armed robbery, tea and biscuits. She is not above bribery and would not necessarily refuse an offer involving exotic travel, champagne or yellow diamonds from Graff. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was 16, is currently studying Old Norse and lives with her husband Kevin and her daughter Anouchka, about 15 miles from the place she was born.”

3/5 Stars: A tangled web woven by a fine storyteller.  Click here to see the Easy Mix Book Review

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid

Ms McDermid is one of my great discoveries of 2009 (apologies to crime-thriller devotees who have been much quicker off the bat than I). The Scottish writer has produced several series of thrillers with different protagonists, and the stars of her latest, Fever of the Bone, are Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill, who have appeared together (but achingly apart) in five previous novels. McDermid is getting such mileage out of the two in part through her clever use of a classic dramatic device – unrealized yearning. They both have serious emotional baggage, Hill from the abandonment of his father (much more of which is revealed in a terrific sub-plot in this book) and Jordan from causes unspecified but manifesting in booze consumption that far exceeds Ministry of Health guidelines for responsible drinking. They live on two different floors of the same house, which doesn’t help with the yearning factor.

The story kicks off with an unwelcome development for Jordan – the new head of her division takes a dislike to the closeness of the relationship between Jordan and Hill, and instructs Jordan to stop using Hill’s services, on the pretext that he is costly, and take on an unhelpful new graduate instead. Hill gets embroiled in the investigation of a murder which turns out to be linked to two other murders Jordan’s team is investigating – all are teenagers who are connected through their membership of RigMarole, a MySpace-style social networking website.

Someone is targeting the teens and tricking them into meeting in person, then inflicting gruesome injuries on them before dispatching them altogether. (Val McDermid has said that, as a female crime writer, she tends to see things from the victim’s point of view and thus avoids unnecessary or gratuitous descriptions of violence – but if you find an average episode of CSI a bit hard to stomach, this book, which features some sexual mutilation, might be a bit steep for you. But you’d be missing out. Just saying.)

We’re off and running, then, in search of the killer (or killers) and the answer to the question of why these teens (all only children, there’s a hint) are being picked off. Meanwhile, the Hill father-son storyline unfolds and inflicts its seismic effect on Hill’s psyche, and there’s the supremely satisfying wrap-up of a cold case.

Like all McDermid novels, Fever of the Bone is carefully constructed to deliver a massive twist right at the end. I defy even the most seasoned crime-thriller readers to see it coming.

Day After Night by Anita Diamant

Anita Diamant made her name as an historical novelist with The Red Tent, a retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, and with Day After Night, she gives voice to women of more recent times – specifically, the inhabitants of Atlit, a detention centre run by the British in Palestine as part of the resettlement programme for European Jews after World War II. Set in the summer of 1945, the novel focuses on four young women who are interned at Atlit and turn to each for support and succour as they plan their escape (the breaking-out from Atlit recounted in the book is based on real historical events).

I must confess to a woeful lack of knowledge about this specific period in history – reading this book proved very edifying, largely because it had never occurred to me to wonder what happened to Europe’s surviving Jews (and non-Jewish refugees who simply wanted shot of that continent forever) between the liberation of the Nazi camps in 1945 and the formal establishment of the state of Israel in 1947. I learned that people fled to Eretz Israel, the biblical name for the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and those who were ‘paperless’, without identification, were held at Atlit, in British-controlled Palestine, until they could be processed and released to live in a kibbutz. Given that the British refused permission for anyone to immigrate in the first place, the process tended to take a while.

It is into this morass that our four traumatized heroines descend: Zorah, an Auschwitz survivor, Tedi, a Dutch Jew who was hidden by a family in the countryside, Shayndel, a Polish Zionist who fought with the partisans, and Leonie, a beauty who was forced into prostitution in Paris. All are young – there was no one over the age of 21 in Atlit at the time in which this story takes place – and all have lost their families. They are dealing with grief, survivor’s guilt, and varying degrees of rage at what has become of their lives.

Diamant isn’t the greatest wordsmith – her talents lie in embellishing real stories, making them readable and capturing the remarkable and unique relationships that women forge with each other. She’s been accused of being one-dimensional in her approach to women’s voices, but for me, the special setting of this book, which has been overlooked by novelists, outweighs any such quibbles.

Kerre and I did agree that the novel ends too abruptly – there is a resolution, but you’re left wanting more. The upside is that it may inspire you, as it did me, to reading more about Atlit, Eretz Yisrael and the British Mandate in Palestine. For anyone partial to a moving and well-researched historical novel with strong characterization, Day After Night will make for satisfying reading.