Review of Simon Mawer's Tightrope

Tightrope, by Simon Mawer (Other Press, November 3, 2015)

During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the new Special Operations Executive to "set Europe ablaze" by supporting the resistance to the Nazis in occupied countries. Many young men and women who knew other languages, especially French, were sent behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and work with local resistance groups. Their chances of being captured, tortured, imprisoned and executed were very high––and they knew it from the start.

For years, I've been fascinated by the story of the SOE, and especially of the young women who volunteered for this lethally dangerous duty. In an era when it was rare for a woman to do anything other than graduate from school to marriage and children, these women were trained in the arcana of espionage, including parachute jumping, hand-to-hand combat and silent killing. What was in the minds and hearts of the women who became SOE agents?

In Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), which is the predecessor to Tightrope, Simon Mawer gives us the story of a fictionalized SOE agent named Marian Sutro. She's English and French, grew up in Switzerland and moved to England with her family as things got dangerous on the European continent before World War II broke out. She had friends in France, especially Clément, the young scientist whom she'd had a crush on for years. When Germany overran France, it seemed very black and white to her; a place and people she loved were in danger from an evil invader and she wanted to help.

When Tightrope begins, the war is in its last weeks and Marian is coming home. She wasn't an SOE agent in France for long. She was betrayed, captured by the Nazis, tortured and finally sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious prison camp for women near Berlin, where many real-life SOE female agents were sent. (By the way, I highly recommend Sarah Helm's masterful history of the camp: Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015).)

Back home in England, nobody knows how to treat Marian and she hardly knows who she is and how she is to live in this postwar world. Mawer evocatively portrays Marian's numbness and alienation, the way she can more easily relate emotionally to her memories of her fellow Ravensbrück prisoners than to her own family and colleagues. To help her recover from her traumatic war experiences, Marian is advised to see a psychiatrist. She tells him that life in the camp appeared to be nothing but gray, but underneath the monochrome their lives were complex, with hierarchies, networks and groups. The way a prisoner made her way through the complex meant the difference between life and death.

Queueing for rationed food in 1947

In many ways, it seemed to me that the same could be said of Marian's life in postwar England. Rationing of food, clothing and other goods continued for years, rebuilding was slow, everybody just seemed to want to keep their heads down, forget the past and get on with things. Gray. But Marian soon learns that the Cold War struggle has begun, another layered reality of complex relationships and loyalties.

Marian is offered a job and she attempts to return to some semblance of a normal life, but her past keeps impinging on the present. She has friends who are nuclear scientists, she has contacts in the intelligence services and, when she returns to Ravensbrück to testify against Nazi prison camp guards, she meets others who are in the intelligence game.

After the US drops atomic bombs on Japan, develops the far more powerful hydrogen bomb and seems to be seriously considering a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, she wonders what was the point of all the sacrifice only a few years before, if World War III is now on the doorstep. Slowly, inexorably, Marian is drawn back into the ambiguous world of intelligence, with its agents, counter-agents, double agents and moles. Marian is once again in an environment where security and life itself depend on hierarchies, networks and groups. Will her choices lead to safety or betrayal?

Although this is a long and slow-moving novel, and Marian is a difficult character, I was riveted. Mawer makes Marian completely believable, even if often not very likable, and he immerses the reader in the tensions and uncertainty of her position, slowly upping the ante as the story goes on. Mawer has done his research, too, and skillfully interweaves real characters and events from SOE history, and British intelligence during the Cold War, into Marian's story. Details of Marian's SOE experiences will ring true to those who have read the histories. Her experiences reminded me a good deal of the description of what happened to SOE agent Eileen Nearne, which you can read about in brief here.

Former SOE agents Eileen Nearne and Odette Sansom
attend the 1993 unveiling of a plaque
at Ravensbrück, where both were imprisoned

Marian's story is told through the eyes of Sam Wareham, the son of Sutro family friends, who met Marian shortly after her return. Sam was 12 years younger than Marian and had an immediate schoolboy crush on her. His fascination for her continued for years to come, including when he became a member of the British intelligence services. The idea of looking at Marian through Sam's eyes has some benefits in telling the espionage story, but some real detriments, since his character so often has to write about events and thoughts that he couldn't know anything about.

Hayley Atwell in Restless

Though I am dubious about the use of the Sam Wareham character, in other respects I think this is a first-rate novel, and should especially appeal to those who enjoy reading about World War II and/or Cold War espionage, particularly about female agents. I liked it every bit as much as William Boyd's Restless (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), a standout novel that was dramatized by the BBC. The three-hour BBC drama, starring Hayley Atwell, Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery and the fabulous Charlotte Rampling, was just released on DVD in the US, in case you're thinking of a good Christmas gift for somebody who enjoys espionage movies.

Although I did read Trapeze before reading Tightrope, I don't think that's at all necessary. Tightrope is also a better read than Trapeze, so if there's any question in your mind about whether you'd like either of them, I'd go with Tightrope first.

Just in case you want to read more . . . 

Note: I received a free review copy of Tightrope from the publisher, through the Amazon Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Heda Margolius Kovály's Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street

Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály (Soho Crime, June 2, 2015)

After World War II, Czechoslovakia had a brief period of democracy until 1948, when it fell to a Communist coup and became a satellite of the USSR. Like so many European Communist states during the Stalin era, party apparatchiks could suddenly find themselves accused of imaginary crimes against the state and lose their positions or even their lives. State Security officials and their informants monitored and reported on activities of ordinary citizens, so that one never knew if co-workers, friends or even family members could be trusted not to be informers.

That’s the background of Heda Margolius Kovály's Innocence, Or Murder on Steep Street. Helena Novákova's world is turned upside down when she loses her job at a publishing house and her husband is arrested and imprisoned as a spy. He isn't, but truth isn't a priority in the paranoid security state.

Fruit and vegetable store in 1950s Prague

Now Helena is an usher at the Horizon cinema in Prague, along with several other female ushers, a manager, a concessionaire and a lone male projectionist. When a young boy visiting the theater is murdered, all of the staff fall under official scrutiny. There doesn't seem to be any mystery about whodunnit, but all the other staff members still have plenty of secrets, veiled by layers of lies.

At the same time that we read about the dual lives of the various Horizon staff members, another thread is Helena's attempts to find help for her husband. These two threads come together in an unexpected way. It's intriguing, but the wrap-up is murky and strays past enigmatic to confusing. In a few other places the writing lacks clarity. Overall, though, I still found it a very readable and atmospheric story.

credit: Marie Šechtlová

It might seem a little strange to have a crime novel told in hardboiled style when it's set in Prague in the 1950s, but I got used to it quickly, especially since the stripped-down bluntness of the style fits the bleak, paranoid time and place. When you find out that Kovály was herself a translator of Raymond Chandler's books, it makes even more sense.

Knowing Kovály's own story isn't necessary to appreciate this stark story of pervasive falsity and fear, but I think it does add something when you know how close this was to home for her. She and her first husband were Holocaust survivors who made it home to Prague, where her husband became an enthusiastic Communist. He was caught up in the infamous Slánský show trials and was executed. When you know that, Helena's thoughts and actions are especially moving.

If you're interested in knowing more about Kovály, read her stunning memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968.

Notes: I received a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Do androids dream of electric detectives?

Made to Kill, by Adam Christopher (L.A. Trilogy, Book 1; Tor Books, November 3, 2015)

In this alternative version of 1965 Los Angeles, the great experiment of doing menial jobs with "machine men" is over. Raymond Electromatic, a whole new model of machine man, rolled off the line just when the government shut down the experiment and all its products. Now Raymond is the world's last––and only––robot.

Raymond and his wisecracking computer partner, Ada, are the creations of scientist Dr.Thornton, who sets up Ada as the back-office brains and Raymond as the front-office muscle in the Electromatic Detective Agency. Once Thornton has passed on, their prime directive is to make money. Ada has figured out that murder for hire is a lot more lucrative than private detection, so now Ray's real job is hit-robot.

But here's the thing. Even though Ray was top of the line for his time, that doesn't mean he and Ada are all that advanced in some ways. When I say Ada is the back-office brains, I mean her hardware takes up nearly all the space in the back office. Ray's hard-wired with lots of fundamental knowledge, but his short-term memory runs on a tape that he has to give back to Ada every night for her to add to her racks of day-memory tapes. He starts each day with a clean tape and no memory of what he did the day before.

Ray's memory limitation is no problem for a hit-robot who's supposed to do an in-and-out kill on the occasional evening, but it's a drawback for a private detective. Still, Ray takes on a new case when that classic plot device of hardboiled fiction, the damsel in distress, walks through the agency's frosted-glass door. This dame offers Ray a big bag of gold bars if he'll eliminate Hollywood actor Charles David, no questions asked.

Ray's a bit of a movie buff, so he's interested in a case that takes him into Hollywood. What he didn't bargain for is finding a weird sort of cult among the movie world's upper crust. This group seems to be planning something really big; something involving Russians. And even though this is an alternative 1965, Russians are just as ominous as they were in our 1965.

Adam Christopher's goal here seems to be to write a Raymond Chandler novel with a robot protagonist. (I doubt it's coincidence that the robot protagonist and Chandler have the same first name.) And he does it fairly well. The hardboiled dialog is there, and Ray's deadpan wit makes him a believable mechanical Marlowe.

Compared to Chandler, though, this is more lightweight fare, a quick, fun read. And it's best to treat it that way and not think too much about the fact that most of the time there's not a compelling reason in the way the story is presented to have Ray be a robot at all. Or that there are way too many sentences including the words "I frowned on the inside" or someone "made a sound like" a cement mixer, a beehive, steam engine brakes, a cat pawing at a mouse inside an air vent, two rocks going for a joyride in a clothes washer, a garbage truck grinding its gears, a sewing machine on overdrive, a clutch slipping and at least a couple of dozen other things. I also would have liked to see more development of the alternative world of 1965, other than just a couple of tantalizing glimpses.

Still, I had fun reading the story, despite its significant drawbacks. The tone is funny with an edge, I grew fond of Ray and the time zipped by as I read. One other thing I should mention; though this is billed as the first in a trilogy, it stands on its own, so there is none of that cliffhanger stuff that makes me want to throw a book against the wall.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Ian Caldwell's The Fifth Gospel

The Fifth Gospel, by Ian Caldwell (Simon & Schuster, March 3, 2015)

Father Alex Andreou is a Greek Catholic priest, which means that he is a subject of the Roman Catholic pope, but otherwise follows the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church. As a Greek Catholic priest, he was allowed to enter the priesthood as a married man.

The priesthood is Alex’s family business and the Vatican is his world. His father was the seventh in a generational line of Greek Catholic priests. Alex lives in his childhood apartment in Vatican City, along with his five-year-old son, Peter. Alex’s wife, Mona, suffered a breakdown from postpartum depression not long after Peter’s birth and left her family.

Alex’s adored older brother, Simon, is a charismatic Roman Catholic priest who is a Vatican diplomat. Like his father and then Pope John Paul, his passionate ambition is to heal the centuries-long schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. At the time this novel is set, the Pope is crippled with Parkinson’s disease and nearing his death, but still absorbed with this goal of rejoining the sects.

A Greek Catholic priest and his family

Alex and Peter are in their apartment, eagerly awaiting a visit from Simon when he calls, evidently distraught, and asks for Alex to meet him at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat, where Alex is shocked to find Simon with the corpse of Ugo Nogara, a museum curator.

Ugo is an old friend of Simon’s whom Alex was tutoring in Gospel theology to help Ugo with an exhibit at the Vatican about the Shroud of Turin. Years earlier, the Shroud had been claimed by scientists to be carbon-dated as being from medieval times and could not have been the burial shroud of Jesus. Ugo promises his exhibit will shatter what the world thought it knew about the Shroud. As if the murder isn’t enough of a shock, Alex and Simon return to Alex’s apartment to find that someone has come into the apartment and rifled Alex’s belongings, while Peter and his caretaker cowered in the bedroom closet.

With Simon reluctant to fill Alex in on what might have been behind these two crimes, Alex begins his own investigation, calling on the many old friends and acquaintances who work at the Vatican as Swiss Guards, drivers and clerics. But the real solution may be the subject of Nogara’s exhibit and, for that, Alex’s expertise in the history of the Gospels is critical.

Pope John Paul returns religious relics stolen in the Crusades to
Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew

You wouldn’t think that a mystery that revolves around the intricacies of Gospel history and critical interpretation could make for a decent thriller plot, but it’s surprisingly compelling stuff. Caldwell has that gift of taking a subject you might not have any interest in and making it fascinating. It doesn’t hurt that he adds in lashings of intrigue, with different groups within the Vatican favoring or implacably opposing any reconciliation with the Greek Orthodox Church––a reconciliation that would have to overcome centuries of hatred and mistrust, due in large part to the violence and plundering visited by Catholic Crusaders on the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople.

If you’re looking for an action-heavy thriller, this isn’t it. The plot plays out deliberately and works more cerebrally than physically. This isn’t just a thriller, though. Unlike so many thrillers, the focus is at least as much on the characters, and on history and ideas. And, with hardly a whiff of romance, this is a novel that is overwhelmingly about love. Love of family, of God, of friends. The kind of love that changes lives and leads to bonds that can’t be broken and to sacrifice.

credit: Interview magazine

The novel is a bit of a slow starter, but as I read on it became completely engrossing. I think it’s important to say you don’t have to be a believer to find the story and its characters compelling. I’ve heard some people mention The DaVinci Code in connection with this book, but this is nothing like The DaVinci Code––and that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

A note about the audiobook: The narrator is Jack Davenport. If you watched the NBC series Smash, he played the libidinous English director. He has a voice like Irish Coffee and, to be honest, he could read me an insurance contract and I’d keep listening.

Review of Sascha Arango's The Truth and Other Lies

The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango (Atria Books, June 23, 2015)

Henry Hayden is one of those very successful writers who pumps out one best-selling thriller after another. His success saved the publishing house that discovered his first manuscript, he's charming to the fans who seek him out in the coastal village where he lives with his quiet wife, Martha, and he is modest and generous. Now, which of these things isn't true? As we find out right off the bat, it isn't Henry who is the writer, but Martha––though not a soul besides the couple knows that.

When Betty, Henry's editor and mistress tells him she's pregnant, Henry's carefully-arranged life threatens to unravel. Henry's quick fix goes awry and he has to engage in more and more complex schemes to avoid exposure of his current misdeeds––and the revelation of his past by an old acquaintance who promises to turn into a nemesis.

You might have figured out by now that Henry is a sociopath and this is one of those books (like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels, for example) that invites us to identify with the amoral lead character. It was hard to do that at first; Henry is just too cold. But as we learn more about Henry, a bit of a thaw comes. Even if it's only admiration of Henry's skill at constructing complex schemes to wriggle out of trouble.

illustration from The New York Times

This short novel moves along quickly and I kept turning the pages as fast as I could to find out what happens to Henry––and to the manuscript Martha has been working on when the novel opens. I enjoyed the plotting, and the translation from the original German is well done.

There isn't much sense of place; in fact, I couldn't tell you where this is supposed to be set, other than that it's a coastal town and it's somewhere in Europe. I would also say that it's not nearly as skilled in roping the reader into "sympathy for the devil" as Phil Hogan’s A Pleasure and a Calling (one of my favorite reads of last year), but it's a quick and entertaining read.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Mick Herron's Nobody Walks

Nobody Walks, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime, February 17, 2015)

After a long career as an ops agent for MI-5, Tom Bettany had had enough. He'd gone undercover for years to bust the McGarry crime organization, and that experience was a stain on the soul. When his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor, he quit to be with her and their son, Liam. After Hannah died, the estrangement from Liam that had begun during his undercover years turned to a complete split.

Bettany became a bit of a drifter, leaving England for France and taking strenuous physical jobs, like his latest one in a meat packing plant. When he gets a call saying that Liam died from a fall from his apartment balcony, where he had been smoking a powerful new strain of marijuana called muskrat, Bettany comes home. Not just to go to the funeral, but to find out exactly what happened.

It doesn't take much of his old intelligence skills for Bettany to figure out that Liam's death was no accident. Now he needs to find out who is responsible and make them pay. With no official sanction and a fierce thirst for revenge, though, Bettany's methods of investigation lack a certain subtlety. In short order, he has problems with a whole raft of dangerous characters, including the muskrat distribution gang's kingpin, McGarry gang members, and the muscle for Liam's boss, who is a multi-millionaire video game creator. And when Bettany gets a call from MI-5, that's not good news, either.

I got to know Herron's writing in the last couple of years, when I read his Slow Horses and Dead Lions. The books are about a group of MI-5 agents who have been exiled from Regent's Park, where the real intelligence action is, to Slough House because of various screwups and misdeeds. These castoff agents are expected to resign at the sheer humiliation, but they're determined to hang on, distinguish themselves somehow and scrape their way back across the Thames.

The Slough House series books are terrific thrillers, stylishly written and with plenty of cynical humor. One running schtick is how the Slough House boss, the slovenly and casually offensive Jackson Lamb, is able to puncture the two top iron ladies at Regent's Park, Ingrid Tearney and Diana Tavener.

Mick Herron

You definitely don't have to read the Slough House books to enjoy Nobody Walks. It stands on its own and has a different style. There is not much humor to be had in Tom Bettany's story. This is a grim and gritty revenge thriller. You can't call Bettany likable, but he's a riveting character and the story is both action-packed and thought-provoking, with plenty of twists and turns. If this book were made into a movie––which would be a great idea––I could see Daniel Craig or Liam Neeson playing Bettany.

If you have read the Slough House books, I think you'll get a kick out of seeing the iron ladies, and you may wonder, as I do, whether Nobody Walks is the end of the Bettany story or if there will be a sequel. And if there is a sequel, might the Slough House gang come along for the ride?

Notes: I was given a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Philippe Georget's Autumn, All the Cats Return

Autumn, All the Cats Return, by Philippe Georget (Europa Editions, 2014)

My favorite mysteries are the ones that expose me to a different world. That's something I get with the Gilles Sebag series, which began with Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored (see review here), and is followed up by Autumn, All the Cats Return. Sebag is a homicide inspector in Perpignan, in France's Mediterranean south, just across the Pyrenées from Spain. Perpignan is a center of the Catalan region and the reader has the pleasure of being exposed to both French and Catalan language, food and culture.

In this new book, the reader's cultural and historical horizons are broadened even further by the book's main plot, which is the murderous targeting of Perpignan residents who, back in the 1960s, were Pieds-Noirs, French residents of Algeria, during the bloody fight for independence.

French President Charles de Gaulle reached a cease-fire agreement with the Algerian independence forces, which outraged a rogue group of French army officers, who formed a guerrilla force called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS. The OAS brutally attacked their opponents, hoping to terrorize them into acquiescence with continued French rule. Despite the appalling numbers they killed, they were unsuccessful and most Algerian residents with French ties fled to France.

Corpses in the streets were commonplace
during the Algerian war for independence

Now, when an old man is discovered executed in his Perpignan apartment, with "OAS" painted on his door, Gilles Sebag and the rest of the squad soon figure out that despite the decades that have passed since Algeria gained its independence, someone is targeting old OAS fighters. After all this time, they have tough challenges to identify potential new victims and to figure out who the murderer could be.

At the same time, Sebag is anxious to help his grieving teenage daughter by conducting an unofficial investigation of the death of her school friend, who was on his scooter when he was struck by a delivery van. The cop assigned to the investigation isn't known for his work ethic, and Gilles wants to make sure his daughter and the dead boy's family know exactly what happened.

Perpignan

If you haven't read the first Gilles Sebag, that's OK. There is not much that happens in the first book you need to know to enjoy the second. There is a running theme from the first book that continues in this book about Sebag's fear that his beloved wife had an affair, but you don't really miss anything on that plot element if you haven't read the first book.

To appreciate this series, I think you need to have a strong interest in reading books set in unfamiliar locales. You must also enjoy a long book with a deliberate pace and an often melancholy tone. The book includes the Victor Hugo quotation "Melancholy is the happiness of feeling sad," and that's an apt comment on the book's own style.

Review of William Boyd's Sweet Caress

Sweet Caress, by William Boyd (Bloomsbury USA, September 15, 2015)

As a young woman, Amory Clay learned a game with her uncle Greville. You must encapsulate someone with just four words. Years later, Amory's daughter describes her as "pretty, stubborn, clever, complicated." And yes, those are all apt descriptions of Amory. The "complicated" is especially true. Amory is someone who can be both guarded and outgoing, careful and impetuous. I loved reading about her so much that I devoured the book in a couple of days and I'm still walking around in a sort of haze of the people and world William Boyd has created.

In this novel, Amory tells her life story in a chronology, interspersed with segments from her 1977 journal, when she has retired from her career as a photographer and is living in a seaside cottage in the north of Scotland, taking walks with her black Lab and enjoying dinners and drinks with a tiny circle of friends. In between, there are stories of family joys and traumas, struggles to become a professional photographer, love affairs, adventures in London, New York, the battlefields of World War II and Vietnam, and the bittersweetness of looking back on life and confronting old age.

Having read Boyd's Restless, a terrific novel about a female spy, I wasn't surprised at his skill in presenting a full-fledged female character. He never falls for the temptation to take his fictional creation and make her some Amazon who accomplishes fantastic feats. His Amory has her successes, but she doesn't become a household name and, by her own analysis, commits several crucial mistakes and has many failures in her life.

She has evolving and complex relationships with her shell-shocked father, her younger brother, her piano virtuoso sister and the men and women in her life. Each relationship feels true, each character is unique. Amory's internal commentary on her life and those who have shared it is unflinching, sometimes very funny, and she never feels sorry for herself.

Boyd's skill at characterization is matched by his ability to convey a sense of time and place. We go from English country life just after World War I to London and decadent Berlin and Paris in the 1930s, various World War II locales, New York City, Saigon and Vietnamese skirmish sites, southern California during the Charles Manson era and Scotland from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Whew! But it's all so real and so deeply felt that I absolutely hated to turn the last page. I just wish I had a thimbleful of Boyd's writing skill so that I could get across the feeling I had reading this book, which is my favorite read of the year.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Breaking Out of a Slump

I've had a terrible time finding good mysteries lately, to the point where I feel happy if I find a book I think is even just OK. But I finally read a couple in the past month that I felt a lot more than OK about.

William Shaw's The Kings of London (Mulholland Books, January 27, 2015) is the second in his police procedural series set in 1960s London. But this is only a little bit the Swinging London of the Beatles, Stones, long hair, granny glasses and Mary Quant minidresses. Mostly, it's the just-barely-out-of-postwar rationing, lousy food, racist and sexist London.

Cathal Breen is a Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police, and the son of an Irish workingman. Breen looks and speaks like any other Londoner but, inevitably, the rest of the members of the force call him Paddy, and he will never be fully accepted as one of them. Another misfit is his sometime partner, WPC Helen Tozer. Tozer, one of the few women on the force who does anything other than traffic patrol and serving as a family liaison, has it even worse than Breen when it comes to taking guff from the other police officers––and firefighters and anybody on the street.

As The Kings of London begins, Breen's in a bit of a funk. His father, who had dementia for a long time and whom Breen had taken care of, has now died and this casts a pall over the upcoming Christmas season. He's even more glum knowing that Tozer is soon to leave the force to go back to run her family's farm after her father has become too ill to manage. As if this isn't enough, Breen is getting death threats at work and he has a new neighbor from hell up above his basement flat.

It's almost a welcome relief to Breen when he catches the gruesome case of a man's body found in a burned building with his skin and hands removed and the carcass drained of blood. Though this looks like a case of torture, Breen soon figures out what really happened. Now it's just a question of why and whodunnit. Those are tougher questions than usual, given the resistance Breen and Tozer receive from the victim's family and higher-ups in the Met.

If you've been looking for a good police procedural, check this one out, especially if the idea of a novel set in London in the 1960s appeals to you. I'll be looking forward to the third book in the Breen and Tozer series, A Book of Scars, which came out in the UK in June.

When I first started reading mysteries back in the 1970s, one of the first series I read was Peter Lovesey's Cribb and Thackeray books, about two police detectives in Victorian London. I've never been much of a fan for the Victorian period, but Lovesey knows how to write a cracking good story with plenty of wit and puzzle-solving interest.

Here it is, 45 years since his first crime novel, and Lovesey is still getting the job done. Since 1991, most of his books have been about Peter Diamond, a homicide Detective Inspector with the Bath, England police force. Usually, Diamond does his sleuthing with the able assistance of his team, the stalwart Keith Halliwell, plodding John Leaman and cheeky former crime journalist Ingeborg Smith––and the occasionally bedeviling by his boss, Georgina Dallymore. Dallymore couldn't detect her way out of a corner shop, but that doesn't prevent her from interfering. When she does, at least Diamond gets to go home to the comforts of his cat and his lady friend, Paloma.

Down Among the Dead Men (Soho Crime, July 7, 2015) is the 15th in the series, and it's a change of pace. To Diamond's dismay, Dallymore insists that he go off with her to West Sussex to help with an internal investigation. What; no team, no home, no cat, no Paloma? Just lots and lots of Dallymore? Diamond is horrified, but he keeps his feelings to himself.

Dallymore is frustratingly close-mouthed about the details of the case and Diamond doesn't find until they reach West Sussex that this is a complaint about a senior detective who succeeded in getting a conviction of a car thief for the murder of a man found in the trunk of a car he'd stolen, but then failed to pursue later evidence that her niece's fingerprints were found in the trunk.

Diamond is gobsmacked to learn that the officer in question is an old acquaintance, Henrietta ("Hen") Mallin. Diamond knows Hen as a supremely competent detective who's rough around the edges and has a raucously humorous approach to life and work––kind of the female version of Diamond. Georgina and Hen promise to be oil and water, so Diamond gives Hen the high sign that they should pretend not to know each other.

A second strand of the story involves a posh girls' school and the disappearance of their unpopular art teacher. When the investigation of Hen's case leads Diamond to inquire into Hen's interest in a series of missing persons cases in West Sussex, the two strands begin to look as if they might be intertwined.

I missed Diamond's working with his team, but his interplay with Dallymore was surprisingly satisfying. At times, Lovesey's depiction of Dallymore tends to the caricature-ish, but there are flashes of a real (though flawed) person in there and I had to admire the way Diamond cleverly plays on Dallymore's vanities to steer the investigation the way he wants.

The solution of the mystery was a little abrupt and not quite satisfying, but it was still a very enjoyable read and definitely helped me feel my good-book drought wasn't dire just yet.

Saying Goodbye to Boredom

I've been in the pits recently, overly busy, grouchy and bored. Things are so bad, I just caught myself watching an online cat video. It was Ninja Cat (with haunting music), but still. Enough is enough.

It's time to read something that kicks boredom to the curb. Here are a couple of books that worked this magic for me and a couple I'm reading now. If you're bored and fed up with your usual fare, maybe one of these will work for you too.

Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a 6'5", 230-pounder with blue eyes and dirty blond hair. This rootless ex-Army MP travels around the country with no cellphone or planned destination and only the clothes on his back. When he needs an outfit change, he buys something and throws the old ones away. Sleep happens wherever he lies down. From time to time, his Army past drags him back into action. For all his toughness and cynicism, Reacher knows what's what and how to use his head. In Personal (Delacorte, 2014), Reacher spots an old Army Times personal ad addressed to him by a man he owes a favor. Almost before Reacher knows it, he's on the hunt for a sniper so skilled only a few in the world are possible suspects. One of the possibilities is a man fresh out of prison who swore vengeance when Reacher put him there 16 years ago. Could he be the one who took the unsuccessful shot at the president of France?

The attempted assassination target and the race to capture a sniper are nods to Frederick Forsyth's 1971 classic, Day of the Jackal, and if you haven't read that thriller and seen the movie, do it. With another nod, this time to James Bond-creator Ian Fleming, whose Bond girls always have ridiculous names, Reacher's potential love interest and work colleague is named Casey Nice. Nice and Reacher (I almost said "Easy") are off to Paris and then London, where they rendezvous with their British counterparts and meet people who aren't Nice. (I can't be expected to pass up the chance to say that.) It's not one of the best Reacher books I've read but any Reacher is better than no Reacher.

Any day of the week, a lot of kids would consider Annette Vess a cool mom. She was a storyteller extraordinaire, especially about how she lost one of her two missing fingers––a mean woman got lucky with a knife in a South American jail. Sometimes "Uncle" Paul would appear and Annette, a spy and single mother, would leave for weeks. Three years after her death, her adult children, Dee and Simon, still find their mother mysterious, but there's no doubt Annette loved them and they loved her. As Jamie Mason's Monday's Lie (Gallery Books, February 2015) opens, Dee is following a blue sedan. We follow Dee back and forth in time as she explores growing up with her mother's spycraft games, her close relationship with her brother, Simon, a cop, and a marriage to a conventional man Dee thought was the antidote to her very unconventional childhood.

This is a book I liked, despite some overly elaborate writing, because at its heart is the great relationship between a spy and her two kids. Although Monday's Lie doesn't provoke the anxiety or provide the macabre humor of Mason's first book, Three Graves Full, there are enough twists and turns and the wonderful legacy Annette left to Dee and Simon to make me happy.

Here are two books I'm reading now. The first, Adam Roberts's Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer, won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel a few years ago. It's billed by the publisher, Gollancz, as Golden Age sci-fi meets Golden Age crime. There are three interconnected stories: a prison breakout, a locked-room mystery and a whodunit. It's set far in the future when humankind populates the solar system. The very wealthy occupy Earth while the very poor (the sumpolloi) are housed in orbiting shantytown bubbles.  Roberts's writing is witty and sly. We know the narrator, Jack Glass, is a murderer from the beginning but the reasons for his merciless nature are only gradually revealing themselves after the opening: "This narrative, which I hereby doctorwatson for your benefit, o reader, concerns the greatest mystery of our time."

Imagine yourself shuffling along when a hole to another universe opens suddenly in front of you. I don't know about you, but I would be just as likely to run screaming the other way as I would be to step in. I do, however, love portals and wormholes in fiction. (Think Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October). Coldbrook (Titan, 2014), sci-fi/horror by Tim Lebbon, is nothing like that quirky and comic Victorian Age gothic, but I was caught at its beginning: "Six hours after forging a pathway from his own reality to another, Jonah Jones closed his eyes to dream." Dream, schream, it's a nightmare for Jonah and the world. The human-like figure that steps out of that hole at Coldbrook, a secret lab in the Appalachians, is not exactly human, after all, and the lab's workers are soon infected. They and I are headed for a tension- and terror-filled apocalypse. Hard to be bored when that happens.