Review of The Dark Room by Minette Walters

Or Minette Walters Number 7 for me. I’m not saying her books are formulaic but they do seem to follow a similar psychological pattern. Having said that they are enjoyable and do keep you working throughout the story to try and nail the real culprit.

This one starts with the main character, Jane Kingsley or Jinx lying in a special clinic with amnesia just having been involved in a car accident when it appears that she tried to kill herself. That’s not all,it would appear she’d tried to gas herself in her garage.

Of course, two bodies are soon found in a ditch in a Hampshire woodland. This is Leo Wallader and Meg Harris both friends of Jinx. Indeed, Leo was her fiancé until recently when he had announaced that He and Meg had got together and were going to get married.

Into this pot you can stir in Jinx’s gangster type father, wastrel brothers, alcoholic stepmother.
You can see that things are set up nicely to find potential killers.

Of course, 10 years before, Jinx’s first husband, was brutally slain in his art gallery by an assailant still not apprehended.

The plot twists and turns and when you think you’ve nailed the potential assailant, you’re persuaded against that solution. In some ways, the guilty party comes out of nowhere in true whodunit style. At the end of the day it is believable but still somewhat contrived.

I will continue reading Minette but do feel that I’ve read her best books now and don’t think they will live up to The Ice House or The Sculptress.

Review of Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Digging to America is the most recent novel to be published by Anne Tyler and was one of this month’s book group selections. After reading and part enjoying The Amateur Marriage I was looking forward to this book and wasn’t disappointed.

Again the book is set in suburban, everyman Baltimore with ordinary people as the players.
The book starts at the local airport when two families wait to meet the Korean infants that they have arranged to adopt. One family, Brad and Bitsy are in every way your typical American family. Loud, opinionated and wanting to get their whole family along to the ‘Arrival’ of their new child, Jin-Ho. The other family are a second generation Iranian couple who are quietly waiting their child, Susan, on their own.

The book continues by interweaving the families and their politics as the two respective babies grow up. BItsy decides that the two families should celebrate the arrival of both children on an annual basis. So the book is episodic. This doesn’t detract from the story though.

It becomes an interesting commentary on immigrant assimilation in modern America. Sami and Zuba are a very pleasant couple who are keen to fit into American society and seem to embrace Bitsy and her artificial celebrations. On the other side Bitsy seems to want to cling to some cultural identity which America seems to lack, whether it is Iranian, Korean or whatever.

One of the more interesting characters, Maryam, the mother of Sami is atypical of the other immigrants. She is a widow who has lived in America for 40 years but still seems to cling to a lot Iranian culture and lives a very simple life on her own. One of the narrative threads through the middle of the book is her relationship with Bitsy’s father, Jim, who is widowed soon after the start of the book. They seem to fall in love and enjoy each other’s company but when Maryam realises what she might be losing she backs right off.

The book ends on a positive note when Bitsy and Brad decide to drag Maryam out to the Arrival party thinking that she feels awkward about meeting Jim. All that has happened is that she’s slept in though and eventually she realises that these people are her friends and want her company for who she is and not because they’re trying to get her to marry Jim.

The book is quite amusing at times, particularly when Bitsy has a party to celebrate her second adopted childed, Xiu Mei, giving up her pacifier or binky. She decides to tie each one (over forty of them) to helium filled ballons and then release them to the sky. Of course, they all end up littering her neighbours’ gardens!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book which I probably wouldn’t have looked at twice if I wasn’t involved in the book group. In many ways it was an interesting read but at no time was it challenging and difficult. Not so sure about my next book group read, Disobedience…..

Review of Seventy Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler

Seventy Seven Clocks is the third to feature his irascible duo, Bryan and May. This time they are on the trail of a gang of Indian thugs who are murdering their way through a thoroughly unpleasant English upper class family. The job falls to the Peculiar Crimes Unit to try and stop the killing spree and find out the reason for the Whitstable family being targeted.

This time the book is set in the winter of 1973 the era of the 3 day week and power cuts when Ted Heath’s government couldn’t cut the mustard any more. In fact, the themes of darkness and light form the core of the story. At the core is an amoral cabal formed by the James Whitstable in 1882 to protect his business interests in England and around the world.

Can’t go into too much detail without giving away the plot though. Suffice to say that Bryant and May haven’t change their ways or methods of detection. At the outset they are separately investigating the vandalism of a Pre-Raphaelite painting in a special exhibition at the National Gallery and the mysterious death of a lawyer at the Savoy Hotel. Soon after a link to the two events is established and the story takes off from there.

Each of the deaths is carried out in a mysterious, arcane manner. For examples, the lawyer dies as a results of venom from a Cottonmouth snake, William Whitstable blows up in a tube train, a tiger is released in one family’s house etc. In fact, I’m surprised that there are any members of the Whitstable clan left by the end of the book.

This series seems to get better and better as it goes on and I’ve certainly noticed that my reading pace has picked up from one book to the next. Luckily, I’ve been lent the next one to read when I want. Unfortunately, I think that is the last for the time being :-(

Review of Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

I wasn’t sure about this one when I found that it was the Book Group’s second selection for the month ( the first being Digging to America by Anne Tyler). The subject matter here was the Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon in North London and one particular family there. Don’t know much about Judaism and I can’t say that I’m driven to study the Torah. Fortunately, it was quite short and after starting it I did manage to get into it and found it quite interesting and informative.

Ronit is a bad girl! She is a lapsed Orthodox Jew living in New York, working as a financial analyst and having an affair with a married man. She does nothing to observe the niceties of her religious and ethnic persuasion. This is despite her father being a rabbi and Rav back home in Hendon.

The book starts off with the Rav dying and the whole community going into mourning for the statutory one week to one month period. Ronit is forced to return home and pay her respects.
The only reason she goes, so she tells herself, is to retrieve a pair of silver candlesticks she remembers from childhood

She stays with her cousin, Dovid, also a rabbi and his wife, Esti. Apparently, she had an unresolved adolescent, lesbian affair with Esti while she was at school. At the start Esti is very quiet and evidently still has strong feelings for Ronit. Fortunately, her husband, Dovid, is aware of her lesbian tendencies and is tolerant of them.

The book takes you through the Jewish ritual of Shabat and a Hesped which are central to their lives and mourning. The characters are very well drawn and although in many ways the culture is alien to me, it is brought alive by the writing. At the start of every chapter there are small sections of parables or lessons from the bible which could rankle but don’t and lead in nicely to the chapter.

One quirk or pretension depending on how you look at it is the difference in font used when the story is seen through the eyes of Ronit or the eyes of Esit. Obviously, this is designed to contrast the difference in observance of the religious customs by these two very different ladies. Towards the end they become somewhat blurred.

In the end, I would give the book 6 or 7 out of ten. Not a bad choice.

Review of One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn is the follow up to Kate’s darkly amusing whodunit, Case Histories.
It features her laconic, world weary now ex-private eye, Jackson Brodie.

At the outset, we learn that Jackson is now living in comfort in the Pyrenees thanks to being left a load of loot by an old lady in Oxford. He is mostly happily involved with Julia who we also met in the last book. They are in Edinburgh where Jackson has agreed to finance a play that Julia’s company are putting on at the Festival Fringe.

The whole book seems to hinge on a road rage incident which features at the start of the story in which everyone in the book that matters is involved or is a witness. The story stems from here and follows four main strands.

The first strand is that of Martin, who is a writer of emasculated crime fiction a la Biggles style and seems to be making a success of it but hates it to bits. Throughout the book he seems to falling to pieces before our very eyes but at the end delivers the coup de grace which gives him eternal redemption.

The second strand is that of Grace Hatter, who is married to an unscrupulous builder who spends the whole book in intensive care while his wife muses on her life with him. This strand becomes boring very quickly but is important for reasons which I can’t divulge here. She feels too sorry for herself by far but is doing her best to spirit her dodgy husband’s money away.

The third strand features Louise, a police DS and single mother who struggles to make sense of the crimes in the story while worrying about her 14 year old son and aging moggy, Jellybean.

The fourth and most important strand features our erstwhile, reluctant hero, Jackson. He becomes involved in something he’s not sure about but because he’s bored out of his mind being a tourist in Edinburgh he decides to become a PI again and give an (illegal) helping hand to the police.

Throw in a dodge agency which hires out cleaners and call girls and a foul mouthed comic who thankfully gets killed very quickly and you have a very entertaining and interesting crime novel which keeps on trying to escape its milieu.

Very good stuff. Are there any more on the way, Kate?