The Bothy by Trevor Mark Thomas

In the 2007 book Freakonomics, the behavioural economists Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner revealed a number of surprising aspects about the world around us. One of those, was that many street level drug dealers actually make little money, that in some cases the cash they earn is less than the minimum wage. This interesting factoid kept coming back to me when reading this novel.

Tom, the protagonist of this novel, is grieving. His girlfriend has died and her family, The Conways, a powerful crime family in the local area, have put a bounty on his head. His friend helps him go on the run and arranges for him to hide in The Bothy, a pub in the middle of nowhere and run by Frank, an aging criminal. Tom is not welcomed by his new co-workers, a handful of misfits and thugs. The only person he really becomes friends with is Cora, Frank’s much younger girlfriend, and something that fuels the others hostility towards him. Frank, however, welcomes Tom with open arms and doesn’t appear to mind his flowering friendship with Cora. 

Tom is put to work at the Bothy and on its surrounding land. It’s a shabby place well past its prime. It becomes apparent that Frank himself was once a crime lord of sorts, running brothels and having his finger in other scams. To a certain extent he still does, a crime gang from Bradford occasionally turn up, but what they’re doing for Frank is never quite clear.

Throughout the novel it is apparent that Frank’s best times are far behind him and this is why it reminded me so much of that Freakonomics revelation. The parallels are far from perfect, Frank is no street dealer and it seems likely that at some point he was earning the big bucks: he seems to own The Bothy for a start and there are hints that he was heavily involved in running rackets once-upon-a-time. He has enemies, either from the old days or from whatever he’s mixed up in now, people he wants dead. But he’s clearly in poverty. The Bothy is derelict, no customers ever visit, and food is sparse; this is no lifestyle of five-star hotels he’s living. Equally, while it’s never spelt out, it seems likely that his crew ended up with him the same way as Tom: through accident and misfortune, rather than choice. Certainly, Frank is not paying them very much, if at all.

All this puts an original spin on the gangster crime novel and helps makes this book an original and compelling tale. While on some levels The Bothy is a story about gangsters, it’s not a gangster novel in the traditional sense. This is a much slower burn novel than many that feature gangsters, much more about the tension between the people living and working in The Bothy, their almost hand-to-mouth existence, the mounting suspicion and paranoia as things start to go wrong and both Frank’s enemies, and The Conways who have put a bounty on Tom’s head, start to encroach. The finale, when it comes, is suitably visceral and fitting to the tone of the novel as a whole.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Bothy and would recommend it highly. This is the author’s debut and a pleasure as a book reviewer is finding new talent. I look forward to reading what he writes next.

5 out of 5 stars

Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman

Erin Locke is a documentary filmmaker engaged to Mark, a handsome banker. She’s working on a film about what happens to prisoners on the cusp of release and has three subjects lined up: Alexa, a forty-two year old convicted for assisting her terminally ill mother’s suicide; Eddie, a gangster who picked up the mantle of the infamous Richardson gang after their downfall and who has been convicted of money laundering; and Holli, a wayward and some might say feral young woman, convicted for arson after the London riots.

Mark loses her job just as they are planning their wedding and her documentary - her big break in the business - is being filmed. Struggling to find a new job they have to cut back on their wedding, but still fly to Bora Bora for a two-week honeymoon. While there they go diving and find something in the water, something sinister that will change their lives forever. They decide to keep it, the temptation too great, and it is here that the story really picks up.

Returning to the UK they need to capitalise on their find and launder the profits. But the original owners are never far behind and soon Erin feels threatened and can sense them closing in. Meanwhile, aspects of her documentary are going awry, bringing her to the attention of the police, exactly what she doesn’t need when engaged in illegality and becoming involved in the underworld.

Something in the Water is brilliantly told and plotted, the author juggling the twin threads - their discovery of something in the water, attempts to launder the profits, while dodging the dangerous owners, with Erin’s documentary and its own brush with illegality - which eventually intertwine and impact on each other. The characters are believable and Erin’s relationship with Alexa, both bonding over their pregnancies - Erin with Mark, Alexa via IVF - is touching and emotional.

But what I really liked about this is the obvious research the author has carried out and how she uses it to great effect throughout the novel. Examples include the lifestyles of the rich and how money makes life much easier in ways readers might not realise, which is fascinatingly illustrated; the minimum depth one should dig a grave so the body is undiscovered; the qualities of diamonds and how much each are worth; how art is used by the super-rich as an investment portfolio. I don’t know how accurate all this is, though it seems authentic - though the minimum depth of a grave I know from my own writing research and can attest to. While as a former documentary film maker myself, I can say that her depiction of Erin’s work in documentaries is also spot on and I really enjoyed this aspect of the novel as well.

Something in the Water is a very compelling story. The author is somebody to watch and I will definitely be reading her next book.

5 out of 5 stars  

The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age by Iain Overton

On 24^thOctober 1990, members of the Provisional IRA forced their way into the home of Patrick Gillespie, a Catholic who worked as a cook at the Fort George British Army Base. The IRA had warned him to stop working at the base, considering his work to make him guilty of collaboration. Now he had ignored their warnings, they forced him into a van laden with explosives, chained him to the driver’s seat and with his family held at gunpoint in his home, ordered him to drive the van to an army checkpoint on the border with the Republic. When he arrived at the checkpoint, Gillespie tried to free himself from the van and warn the soldiers, but the explosives had been wired to explode should the door be opened, and he and five soldiers died in the ensuing explosion. This was one of three “proxy” bombs - forced suicide bombings in effect - that the IRA carried out during the Troubles. More were planned but the outrage was such that the IRA abandoned the tactic.

The IRA’s experiment with forced suicide bombing is just a footnote in the history of suicide bombing more broadly, and when compared with the wave of suicide bombings to wreak havoc throughout the Middle East down the years, for example, it hardly bears mentioning. A lesser writer, a more insubstantial treatment of the phenomena that is suicide bombing, would have ignored it entirely. But the author is nothing if not thorough and his latest book The Price of Paradise is nothing if not detailed and comprehensive and so it appears within its pages. As does a wealth of other fascinating, albeit sometimes grisly, and oftentimes deeply depressing, information.

The Price of Paradise traces suicide bombing from its earliest roots in Tsarist Russia, when the People’s Will group decided to assassinate Tsar Alexander 11, one of its members opting to ensure success by blowing himself up in close proximity to his target. While there had been suicidal and sacrificial acts in war before, this was the first time someone had explicitly opted to die in such a manner, laying down their own life to ensure that they take the enemy with them. The phenomenon was only to spread from there, leapfrogging to the Far East where both Japanese and Chinese forces used such tactics against each other. And then came the Kamikaze, the tactic of the Imperial Japanese Army against the superior American naval power. The chapter the author dedicates to the Kamikaze is eye-opening in itself, the author arguing convincingly that the tactic and its psychological impact goes someway to explaining why President Truman felt it necessary to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a recurring theme that runs throughout the narrative: that suicide bombing inevitable leads to overreaction and punitive response and while sometimes, as in Japan in the Second World War, this might end the conflict (albeit with massive and horrific loss of life), all too often it creates further resentment and thus sparks further violence and attacks. 

The Price of Paradise traces the tactic onwards from here to its embrace by a perhaps surprising range of often diametrically opposed forces. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, a Tamil nationalist group; Shia Iran in its war with Sunni Islam; Shia Hezbollah, Marxist militia and Christian Phalangists in the Lebanon; now Sunni extremist groups throughout the Middle East. All these factions, implacably opposed to each other, have each embraced the tactic. For example, in the 1980’s when Shia Iran began using it, waves of Iranian fighters throwing themselves against the better armed Iraqi forces, one might have been forgiven for assuming suicide bombing to be peculiar to that branch of Islam. And certainly, when the Ayatollah Khomeini was the West’s bogeyman, that was indeed the lazy assumption. But while Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah still utilise the tactic, it is now groups from the Sunni tradition, al Qaeda and ISIS, who are perhaps the worst culprits.    

As explicitly made clear in the book’s sub-heading, the author’s thesis is that suicide bombing and states’ reactions to it have shaped the world and it is difficult to argue with this thesis. The biggest suicide bombing the world has ever seen was 9/11 and no one could honestly argue that this single incident changed the course of human history, leading as it did to the invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting never-ending war that that country remains, and the Bush Administration’s calamitous decision to invade Iraq. But this was no exception and the history of the effects of suicide bombing - the bombings themselves and the reactions to them - have been in microcosm what occurred after 9/11, real impacts have been felt. Laws have been changed, freedoms have been lost, and Islamophobia in particular has spread. 

As with the author’s previous work, a study of the impact of small arms titled Gun Baby Gun, underpinning The Price of Paradise is a wealth of facts, statistics and fascinating anecdotes. Many non-fiction titles have endnotes, all too often they add nothing to the book, but with The Price of Paradise they’re essential, adding intricate detail to what is found in the main body of the text. If I have one criticism of this book it is that it has no index, an oversight that I find inexplicable, for there’s simply so much here that the reader might want to refer back to that really an index feels to me that it should be essential.

That said, this is a minor quibble as I can’t see anyone writing a better history of the phenomena that is suicide bombing in a long while. Essential reading, this is definitely a book worthy of 5 stars. 

The Killer Across the Table by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Having recently started watching Manhunter on Netflix, my interest in the FBI officers who pioneered criminal profiling has grown. One of the most renowned FBI profilers, a man who is a legend within the Bureau (and indeed wrote the book the NetFlix show is based on and is a consultant for the show) is John Douglas. Douglas has written a number of titles about his experiences of criminal profiling, not least his most famous book, Manhunter (again, the basis for the show). The Killer Across the Table is his latest title and takes an in-depth look at four different serial killers.

The United States has given the world a plethora of infamous serial killers. From David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, to Ed Kemper (who appears in Mindhunter, both the book and the show); from Richard Ramirez to Ted Bundy, the US is no stranger to serial murder and the perpetrators who kill and maim. The Killer Across the Table surprises in that Douglas and his co-author choose four murderers who are relatively unknown outside of the United States.

Joseph Kondo, Donal Harvey, Todd Kohlepp and Joseph McGowen might not have the international infamy of Jeffrey Dahmer (though from what I understand they are quite well known in America) but their crimes are no less horrific and the experience of sitting across the table from them and interviewing them extensively, as Douglas has done, I imagine to be no less harrowing. 

Douglas’s technique is to gain the killer’s trust and get them to talk. He utilises many techniques of his own devising to do this and soon they won’t stop talking, describing in graphic detail their deeds. An important aspect of his work is to not show his disgust at what they tell him, something I imagine must be incredibly hard to do. As with any examination of real-life serial murder, and perhaps especially so with this title, this is not for the faint hearted. The details described in this book are harrowing in the extreme. That said, this is not just gratuitous salaciousness, but rather an attempt to understand what makes such people tick and thus is well worth a read if interested in the subject.

4 out of 5 stars  

The Killer You Know by S. R. Masters

This is part whodunnit, part psychological thriller, and part serial killer thriller. When a group of friends meet up for a reunion having not seen each other since their teenage years, they start reminiscing about the past. One of their number hasn’t turned up and they recall how he said he wanted to become a serial killer, that having learned that one needs to commit three murders to be categorised as a serial killer, one day he would go off the radar and kill three people in three particular ways, making their deaths appear like suicides. They would read about the deaths, realise he had gone to ground, and know he had fulfilled his promise.

The friends - Adeline, Rupesh, Jen and Steve - talk about their missing friend, Will, recalling how strange and odd he was. Wracking their brains, they dredge up the ways Will said he would kill his victims and stage their suicides - the method of death, the locations he would do it - and they Google these on their phone. They are horrified to discover that deaths as described have occurred, and combined with the fact that Will does indeed appear to have gone off the radar, they fear the worst. So begins their investigation, none of them taking it too serious at first, all of them starting to do so as the narrative unfolds.

The novel is structured in alternating chapters, those set in 2015, the year of the reunion, and the summer of 1998 (though a couple of the past chapters are set in 1997). The 2015 chapters are all told from Adeline’s perspective and she is the novel’s main protagonist, while the chapters set in the 90’s alternate from each character, so we gradually learn how their teenage years were perceived by each of them in turn. It is an effective structure which allows the author to tease out the tensions amongst what at first appears to be a close-knit friendship group.  

As teenagers, the group lived in the small village of Blythe and it is to here that they return for their reunion. Another reviewer on Amazon compared the chapters in the 90’s in particular as akin to something Stephen King might write, and with its depiction of young people coming of age, while grappling simultaneously with the boredom of rural living and a growing sense of foreboding, there’s definitely something in that comparison. Another author who’s work it compares is CJ Tudor’s novels. Obviously King and Tudor write horror and supernatural suspense, while Masters has written a crime/suspense novel, but there’s definitely a strong similarity. Stretching the comparison a little further, the 2015 chapters where the characters have to return to where they grew up to slay their demons is akin to King’s novel It, where the characters have to return to finally deal with the demonic clown Pennywise. 

The Killer You Know is a well crafted crime novel and one that kept me interested to the end. Needless to say things aren’t as simple and straightforward as they first appear and the friends quest to find out if Will has indeed become a serial killer opens up a Pandora’s Box of adolescent grudges and tensions that perhaps would have been left buried in the past. It’s well plotted, keeping the reader guessing and second guessing and there are plenty of twists, though when the final denouement comes it’s clear that Masters left a trail of clues throughout (plus the odd red herring of course). All in all this was a thoroughly enjoyable debut and this is an author to watch.

4 out of 5 stars

Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers

Set in a post-Brexit world, this novel by Sam Byers, takes aim at a multitude of targets: the rise of the far right and the related coarsening of public discourse; the commentariat - both in traditional media such as newspapers and online, and their various obsessions; the harassment of women and minorities online; urban development and immigration; the domination of our life and world by tech companies and social media. And more besides. 

The narrative takes place in a fictional English town, Edmundsbury, which to me evoked a place like Milton Keynes, one of these outlying towns which tries desperately to attract businesses and corporate HQs to their business parks in order to raise revenue.  In Edmundsbury’s case that means Green, a multinational tech behemoth more in keeping with California’s Silicon Valley. Green is given such leeway that quietly it’s been allowed to tamper with the town’s infrastructure, it’s street-lighting for example.  Meanwhile, the local run down Larchwood housing estate is being emptied, residents persuaded through all manner of means - both carrot and stick - to decant elsewhere. When a bunch of tricksters in masks calling themselves The Griefers turn up, threatening to expose people’s online secrets to all and sundry, the delicate balance and tensions that exist in the town and between the book’s cast of characters threatens to spin off kilter. 

There’s Robert Townsend, a centre-left blogger, his partner, Jess Ellis, a researcher into internet misogyny, and his nemesis, Julia Benjamin - a mysterious online force who comments on everything he posts, meticulously and critically dissecting it; there’s Trina James, a worker at Green who also lives on the Larchwood Estate, and Alfred Darkin, one of Trina’s neighbours and a disabled man with whom the developers are starting to get heavy; there’s Hugo Bennington, the leader of the England Always party, and a definite parody of Nigel Farage, and finally Teddy, Hugo’s surreal political adviser and part-time “productivity guru”.

All these characters are finely balanced and have almost equal parts to play in the plot, their tales finely interwoven into a story that many a reviewer has likened to an episode of Black Mirror. Perhaps it’s my political and journalistic background, but my favourite strand had to be the more overtly political. Hugo Bennington and his England Always party were wonderfully written, Hugo’s inner voice pretty much how I suspect Farage’s to be. While Teddy swings between both absurdity and sinister. Their relationship too with another organisation Brute Force - which is reminiscent of the English Defence League - Hugo and Teddy meeting Brute Force’s leader incognito to coordinate activity, while keeping them at arm’s length.  

Having been a journalist for a good number of years, the author’s depiction of the commentariat - the bloggers and opinion piece writers - was also spot on. Without naming names, I came into contact with many of this type, some household names, and the opinion I formed of some of those of a more controversial ilk was that it really was like a game to them, that they didn’t realise, nor particularly care, about the impact of the poison they dripped into the body politic. This is vividly described in this novel and a number of the most reprehensible characters to populate the book’s pages are such people. 

A big target of Perfidious Albion is the impact of tech companies and social media on all our lives, and again being careful to avoid spoilers, it’s safe to say that this is central to the novel’s plot, and that all the strands revolve around this. That said, this novel is hugely ambitions, perhaps too much so, for I did feel that its impact was lost somewhat by its diffusion. By having so much to say about so many subjects, the author risked blunting his story’s impact.

Perfidious Albion is beautifully written, and at points is raucously funny. Again, I found the dialogue to and fro between Hugo Bennington and his advisor Teddy, to be especially so.  This is not a genre novel, not a beach read, rather it’s a cerebral and timely novel that has much to say about contemporary politics, the impact of social media and technology, the structure of society. It’s well worth a read.

4 out of 5 stars

We All Fall Down by Daniel Kalla

This is a novel about a black death outbreak in modern day Genoa. By absolute coincidence I recently read up on the plague, why it was that the in the middle ages it killed so many, and yet while the plague still exists (unlike say Smallpox which has been eradicated), while there are still outbreaks, they are never so deadly. It turns out that the plague is like the flu in that there have been different variants. Most flu doesn’t become a deadly pandemic, but in 1918, the Spanish flu was just that, killing millions. The same is true of the plague. The variants around today are not the same as those which ravaged Europe and much of the world in the middles ages, which has disappeared for reasons unknown. We All Fall Down imagines a scenario where this, far deadlier plague, returns. As the text on the cover reads: Centuries ago the plague killed millions. Today it might kill billions.”

Dr Alana Vaughn, the novel’s protagonist, is an infectious disease specialist who in the past has worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO). She now works for NATO and her job is to watch out for signs of germ warfare, as well as natural outbreaks which might threaten order in the societies of member nations. When she hears about the plague outbreak she flies to Italy to check it out. She quickly discovers the outbreak to be of the deadlier variety and together with the WHO team on the ground, and local Italian doctors, they try to contain the rapidly spreading outbreak. As part of their efforts they try to discover the source of the outbreak and this entails detective work.

Their efforts lead them to multiple potential suspects. Is it a bioweapon? Both the Soviet Union and the United States weaponised plague virus during the cold war. Whether or not it is, has it’s release to do with terrorism? Has it been released accidentally? Or has the plague come from a natural source? Just as in the middle ages, the virus itself, and the deaths it causes, is only part of the problem. People’s fear and their associated need to find a scapegoat leads to social tensions and it isn’t long before immigrants are being blamed for the outbreak.

We All Fall Down is compared on the cover to Contagion meets The Da Vinci Code, and without giving away spoilers, while I can see why it has been compared to the latter, it is far more the former. At heart this is a novel about the reemergence of the plague, a medical thriller rather than a religious-conspiracy novel. The author, Daniel Kalla, is himself a doctor practicing emergency medicine and this shows. Nor is this his first novel about pandemics (in fact one of his previous novels, titled Pandemic, is about a deadly outbreak of flu). It is not too heavy on the medicine and science but he clearly knows his stuff and writes with authority.

Dr Alana Vaughn and her supporting cast of characters are compelling and well drawn and the novel presses the right buttons, the narrative moving along at a fast pace that kept me turning the pages. The plot itself holds together and resolves itself satisfactorily. All in all this is an enjoyable novel and one that posits a frightening scenario, all the more nightmarish because a global pandemic is far from the realm of fantasy and could well occur some day.

3 out of 5 stars