Written in Blood by Chris Carter

This is my first Chris Carter title and is apparently the eleventh in his series to feature protagonist, Robert Hunter, of the LAPD’s Ultra Violent Crime Unit. It can be read as a standalone though, as indeed I did, and I had no trouble following the narrative as the story is self-contained.

When Angela Wood, a prolific thief and pickpocket, sees a man being rude to an elderly gentleman in a bar, she decides to teach him a lesson and steal his bag. Later, back in her apartment, she discovers that it contains a journal that records the thoughts and deeds of a highly intelligent serial killer, a man who has been operating undetected for many years. 

She posts the journal to the police anonymously and that is when the Hunter, and his partner Carlos Garcia, become involved. They track Angela down, due to a fingerprint she left on the journal, and take her into protective custody. It isn’t long before the killer is on her trail. He’s super intelligent and manages to stay one step ahead of the police and soon Hunter and Garcia are desperately trying to stop him.

This is a rollercoaster read, full of tension and twists and turns. As with other titles in this sub-genre, the serial killer thriller, it’s quite graphic, with the murders brutal and violent. The author is adept at throwing up red herrings and this is a novel that will keep you turning the page and guessing until the very end.

3 out of 5 stars

The Big Chill by Doug Johnson

This is the second in the author’s trilogy about the Skelf family, and while it’s not essential to read its predecessor, A Dark Matter, readers will be doing a disservice if they don’t. This is both because the back story contained in the first book will enrich the reading of the second and because A Dark Matter is an excellent book in its own rite.

The Skelfs are three generations of women: Dorothy, the elderly matriarch, is an immigrant from California long relocated to Scotland; Jenny, is her daughter, and Hannah, her granddaughter. The three operate a funeral directors and a private investigation service, the former successful, the latter fledgeling and less so. 

In A Dark Matter, Jenny’s ex-husband and Hannah’s father, Craig, was exposed as a murderer. He had killed Hannah’s friend after having an affair with her and getting her pregnant. He later tried to kill Jenny and Dorothy when he was discovered. The book ended with his capture. Events in The Big Chill continue on from there. Craig is awaiting trial and is a destructive presence in their lives. When he decides to change his plea from guilty to diminished responsibility, the disruption gets worse.

As with the first title, subplots run through the novel that originate from either the Skelf’s funeral director business, or private investigation practice, or occasionally, from both. Throughout the narrative, the characters reflect on death, quantum physics (Hannah is studying physics at university) and the quandary that is this thing we call life.

The Skelf books are a mix of cosy crime and something with a harder edge. They don’t shy away from difficult subject matter, but these aren’t noir or the darker crime thrillers that I’m normally drawn to. They are great books though and they have a real heart that has you connect with the characters. The sections that ruminate on death and the quantum universe are engaging too, and certainly, they make you think.

The author has a third novel in the series planned and I look forward to seeing how the Skelf story continues.

4 out of 5 stars  

From Aconite to The Zodiac Killer: A Dictionary of Crime by Amanda Lees

Research is the lifeblood of all writing (well, one of them. Can you have more than one lifeblood? Probably not, but hey). While some writers hate it, others love it. I’m firmly in the latter camp. For what is there not to like? It’s interesting, presuming you’re writing about something that aligns to your interests or you enjoy, and you really should be, and you learn all kinds of fascinating facts.

But how to do one’s research? Well, obviously there’s that vast space known as the internet, but that’s sometimes the problem: it’s so vast. And not everything makes it on there, and some things are obscure and difficult to find and doing so takes time.  So, there’s always room for a few choice books.

One such tome is most definitely Amanda Lees' new dictionary. At 320 pages, it's jam-packed with all manner of information, and while some of it is undoubtedly discoverable online with the right combination of search terms, why bother when you have this little compendium on the shelf nearby?

From famous serial killers to historical and contemporary gang slang, from forensics to poisons with which your antagonist can despatch their victims, it’s all here and more. There’s the terminology of the police and intelligence services, legal terms, and definitions of the myriad subgenres that make up the crime fiction canon.

Arranged as a dictionary (obviously, for that’s what it is) it’s all easy to find and is a wealth of information for the crime writer, writers in general, readers and the lay public.

My personal favourites are the poisons, something I have a perverse fascination in (no, don’t worry, I’m not a serial killer, just a writer) and the author has done an admirable job including a great range. Not just the obvious either - the cyanide and the arsenic - but the more obscure such as aconite, succinylcholine (not strictly a poison, but for us crime writers it might as well be), and my personal favourite, nicotine. Again, the author has done a great job summarising them and explaining how they can be used by our characters to despatch their victims.

This is definitely a must buy and the author has done a great job collating it all and explaining even the most complex subjects as simply as possible so that they’re comprehensible. Not easy when having to aim for brevity too.

A brilliant resource and one that every writer and reader should have on their shelves, do yourselves a favour and get a copy.

5 out of 5 stars 

Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay

The state of New England is in lockdown, a virulent new strain of plague having swept the land. Hospitals can’t cope and society is teetering on collapse. Amidst all this carnage, a pregnant woman, Natalie, is bitten and her husband killed. Natalie flees her house and calls her closest friend, English-born paediatrician Ramola Sherman. So begins a road trip across the pandemic inflicted landscape.

Survivor song is billed as both a pandemic novel and the author’s take on the zombie genre. The rabies virus in this book is virulent, affecting people within hours. Then becoming delusional and aggressive, the victims act like zombies from the movies. 

From my experience readers are torn at the moment when it comes to reading pandemic-set fiction. Some are shunning it, wanting escapism from the Covid-19 lockdowns of reality. Others are embracing it. There’s clearly still a market, with Contagion being one of the most-watched films on Netflix and a number of such titles flying from the bookshelves. Personally, I have to admit to being in the former camp and so was a little wary of reading this. But Paul Tremblay is an author who I’ve heard much about and I’ve been reading quite a bit of horror recently, so I dived in.

I have to say that I’m glad I did, because this is a brilliant book, possibly my book of the year so far. In part it’s because it’s not a pandemic novel as such and it’s not really a book about zombies. Both these elements are there of course, but really this is a book about friendship. Two women, who are close friends, who have to navigate the aftermath of a disastrous event.

There are touches of social commentary: a President ill-suited to confronting the crisis and unwilling to take control; the peddlers of conspiracy theory and the racism, xenophobia and militias they stoke; two young teenagers who view everything through the prism of video games and Hollywood movies. It all works well, but at heart, this is a simple tale of two friends' reliance on each other and their attempts to get through in one piece. It’s in its telling of this simple truth which makes this book excel.

Horror fiction is having a bit of a resurgence at the moment and Paul Tremblay is one of the new breed of authors leading the charge. Survivor Song is the first novel by him that I’ve read, but on the basis of this, I’ve already bought one of his earlier titles, The Cabin at the End of the Woods. His publisher, Titan Books, is on a run too. Not only do they publish Tremblay, but they also publish Tim Lebbon, who’s novel Eden was excellent, and I’m looking forward to The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones.

Survivor Song is truly an excellent novel and a great addition to the Titan Books canon. I can't recommend this book enough.

5 out of 5 stars

The Holdout by Graham Moore

After a teenage girl, Jessica Silver goes missing, it isn’t long before her teacher, Bobby Nock, is accused of her murder. He’s brought to trial and the evidence appears damning: The two were having a relationship with inappropriate messages exchanged between them; her DNA is found on both the passenger seat and in the boot of his car, and he lied as to his whereabouts on the night of her disappearance. 

It isn’t long before he’s brought to trial and a jury is sworn in. During the trial, two jurors begin a relationship, defying the rules against such a thing.  Maya Seale is an idealistic young woman while Rick Leonard is working on a PhD in urban planning. They are falling in love. Until that is, it comes to the deliberation. For then they discover they’re on opposing sides. Everyone agrees that Bobby Nock is guilty, except for Maya who believes there’s reasonable doubt. As the holdout on the jury, she argues her case and slowly exhausts everyone to come over to her side. It’s the right thing to do perhaps, but a Pyrrhic victory as far as her personal life is concerned, for it destroys her relationship with Rick.

Years later Maya is a successful lawyer, while Rick has spent his years trying to prove that Bobby Nock was guilty and that Maya made a terrible mistake. He approaches her outside of court saying that a documentary team wishes to reenact the trial and that he has new evidence that will prove Nock’s guilt once and for all. She reluctantly takes part and one of the jurors is murdered, Maya becoming the prime suspect.

This novel is told in intervening timelines, the original trial of Bobby Nock and the arguments and deliberations in the jury room, and the present day where Maya is trying to prove her innocence, something that forces her to reinvestigate the original case. It’s all handled with aplomb and self-assurance. But personally, this book just didn’t come alive for me. It’s become something of a sensation, with a Netflix series adaptation in the works, but for me, it just lacked a certain magic.

As a British reader, what I did find interesting were the differences between US law and procedure (in this case that of the state of California) and the UK. The fallout of the case is such, with Bobby Nock having been tried in the court of public opinion, that the not guilty verdict has real ramifications for the jurors. This is something that doesn’t happen in the UK, as contempt of court legislation means that there are reporting restrictions on what can be reported during a trial. Furthermore, it is illegal to report the goings-on and deliberations that take place within juries in the UK. So members of UK juries are never subjected to this kind of scrutiny and criticism.

Another striking difference was the treatment of sex offenders. Apparently, in California, someone on the sex offenders register has to literally knock on all the doors in the neighbourhood to announce his or her presence when they move into an area. What this leads to is sex offenders being ostracised and banished from society and setting up their own little communities. There are trailers parks consisting entirely of sex offenders. Now, sex offenders are not a sympathetic constituency, and I’m not suggesting that people should feel sorry for them. That said, you don’t need to be the caricature of a bleeding heart liberal to see this as akin to something from the middle ages, and imagine that it does more harm than good. Surely these people need to be treated and monitored, rather than left to their own devices in makeshift ghettoes?

These elements, fascinating though they may be to a British reader, make up just a small fraction of the book, and the novel is in the main a legal thriller akin to something that John Grisham might write. In my opinion, it’s a good book, but not great, though if you’re a fan of the genre you might like it more than I did.

3 out of 5 stars

  

Ride or Die by Khurrum Rahman

This is the third outing for Jay Qassim, the protagonist of Khurrum Rahman’s excellent spy thriller series. I’ve read and reviewed both of the previous books and was very keen to read this and see how poor Jay is getting on.

Ride or Die picks up where book two, Homegrown Hero, left off. Imran Siddiqui, one-time sleeper terrorist and a man who was tasked to kill Jay and failed to do so, lives with the consequences: his family murdered in a suicide bombing revenge attack. Jay Qassim for his part has been dropped by MI5 once more. Always the unwitting agent, they now have no further use for him. There’s tension between the two because Imran blames Jay for the death of his family. If only he had obeyed his orders and killed Jay, his family would still be alive. Jay for his part feels overwhelmed by guilt.

These two are thrown together once more when they learn that Jay’s father, the leader of a global jihadi group, might still be alive. Jay is conflicted. He hates what his father did, the terrorism that he instigated, but the man's still his dad. Imran blames Jay’s father most of all for the death of his family, it was he after all who gave the orders. The two are tasked to go to Pakistan/Afghanistan to track down Jay’s father, but they both have conflicting and unspoken intentions for what to do when they get there. And what of MI5? And what of the new splinter group, more virulent than that which Jay’s father led?’

Ride or Die is a slight departure for Rahman in that his previous two books have focused a lot more on Jay's relationship with MI5. He was bullied to a great extent into becoming a source for the Security Service and this portrayal, and the tensions between on the one hand MI5 doing valuable work in stopping terrorism, and on the other, their manipulation and coercion of young Muslims in order to achieve this, was very well portrayed. In this book, MI5 is still on the scene, but Jay is divorced from it to a greater extent because he’s in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he has his own motivations for being there.

But the fact that the author has taken a slightly different path for this novel is no bad thing and Ride or Die remains a great addition to the series. Neither has the author lost his eye for critical representation of the intelligence agencies and Western foreign policy. Without lapsing into polemic, neither gets off lightly in this novel. While no excuses are made for the jihadis and their violence, this novel, like its predecessors, continues to be a corrective to some of the more tub-thumping examples of the spy thriller genre.

Finally, I need to say something about the humour in this title. In each of my reviews for Rahman’s novels, I’ve tended to focus on the more serious elements and neglected to stress how these are also great fun to read. Jay is his usual brash and bolshy self, always ready with a quip and a great turn of phrase. These books are a joy to read but have a heart and a cerebral core too.

As always with Rahman, Ride or Die is highly recommended, and I look forward to the next instalment in the series.

 4 out of 5 stars