The Two O'Clock Boy by Mark Hill

I was really looking forward to this novel as its author is someone who’s blog I used to read regularly. In a past life Mark Hill ran the Crime Thriller Fella blog, a book reviewing blog like this one (though I imagine he had far more readers than I). The best part of his blog was a section he titled the Intel where he interviewed authors and asked them for advice on writing. For again, like myself, while Mark reviewed books, what he really wanted was to be the one writing them. Well Mark is now a published author, whilst I’m still an aspiring one, so what did I think? Did his debut live up to expectations? Did he take on board all that advice, or did it all go to waste?

Well I’m happy to say that his debut hits the spot nicely and he clearly was listening when all those writers he interviewed spilled their secrets. The Two O’Clock Boy is a tense serial killer thriller, with a good undercurrent of noir. While it’s theme, firmly rooted in the abuse and casual violence of a 1980’s care home, couldn’t be more current, what with the ongoing inquiry into historical child abuse.

Now readers of my reviews will know that I’m not really a fan of the serial killer genre. Too often they descend into crude schlock, if not torture porn. Pleasantly the author avoids this, and while there is a high blood and gore quotient, it’s never overdone, one never gets the feel that the author is just upping the ante for the salacious pleasure of his readers. Perhaps more importantly, he avoids the usual trotting out of the tired old psycho serial killer tropes. Our killer doesn’t come up with myriad exotic ways to keep his victims alive before dispatching them with Heath Robinson ingenuity. Nor does he appear out of nowhere, as if psycho serial killers live around every corner. Rather the author anchors him firmly in the past of care home abuse, so that we understand how his psychological and moral growth became so stunted. This is both more realistic and performs that feat that many an author tries and fails at, namely eliciting some empathy for the villain.

And it’s hard not to feel sympathy for the killer, given all that they suffered as a child. With what we now know of the abuse that many suffered in the care system in the 1970/80’s, the predatory paedophiles with links to the establishment, the Jimmy Saviles, it’s little wonder that many are scarred by their experiences. And this is another strength of this book. Many of the other characters are victims of the care home system, not least our protagonist DI Ray Drake. Some of the best scenes in this novel are those set in the care home, where the author writes powerfully of broken childhoods and emotional neglect.

Drake himself is dark horse with many secrets and without divulging spoilers it’s not clear by the end of the novel whether he’s expunged them all. For example, who is the boy in the prologue who kills his parents? Is it Drake? This is never answered. I imagine that this is with a view to a sequel. I hope so. I for one will be reading it.

5 out 5 stars.

100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition: The SEAL Operative's Guide to Surviving in the Wild and Being Prepared for Any Disaster

A few months ago I bought a book that is amazing for an aspiring crime/thriller writer like myself. Titled 100 Deadly Skills and penned by an ex-SEAL, Clint Emerson, it was like a tome of forbidden knowledge. Want your character to escape from handcuffs, cable ties, the boot of car after being handcuffed? 100 Deadly Skills had it all. And there was more. Who knew, for example, that one could build a makeshift TASER from a disposable camera?

So you can imagine my excitement when a sequel hit the virtual shelves of review site NetGalley. I immediately put in my request and received a review copy of 100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition. As its name suggests the second book focuses more on survival, survival in the wilderness, the desert, the mountains, etc. For sure there is much to recommend this tome, some great nuggets both for real life and, for the writers like myself, for fictional characters and the tales they find themselves in.

The problem is that by moving to a survival manual, Clint Emerson is shifting into an already very crowded field. There are many, many survival and field craft books out there. Shelves of them. I should know, I have quite a few of them. What made 100 Deadly Skills so unique was its originality. Not very many books teach you how to make a makeshift cosh for example. Another problem is that there is more generalised advice in this tome, whereas in the original there was much more specific examples. This is not to say that this latest offering isn't a good book, it is. Would I buy it? Would I recommend it to a friend? Probably. But I would recommend the original first.

3 out of 5 stars

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

Ok, first off a confession. This whole "domestic noir" thing, Gone Girl, Girl On a Train, etc, etc, doesn't really do it for me. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against it, even enjoyed the Gone Girl film, but it doesn't really float my boat. To be fair I'm probably not the target demographic. At risk of being presumptive, I imagine the genre is targeted at a female audience. That said, I did enjoy the film of Gone Girl (as already said) and domestic noir is the hottest thing in crime fiction at the moment, so I thought I should really give such a book a go.

So along came Missing, Presumed on Netgalley. I put in my request, received the book for review, and here we are. Missing, Presumed tells the story of Edith Hind, a Cambridge student from an affluent, upper class family, who goes missing one frozen, winter night. Cambridge police are called in by her boyfriend who finds her front door open, blood in her kitchen, and possible signs of a struggle. The story follows the investigation and the wider milieu of Edith's friends and family as they cope with her disappearance.  Chapters alternate from different character's perspective, so we get the story from DS Manon Bradshaw (one of the cops) from Edith's mother, her best friend, etc.

This is a slow burner of a book, don't expect fast paced action or plot development. Many of the characters are a little odd, so we get a lot about Manon Bradshaw's internet dating, her loneliness, her trouble with men and the gulf that exists between her and her family. While Manon is the closest we come to a main character, much time is also spent with her friend Helena and her mother Miriam.

Putting aside that domestic noir isn't really my bag, there are some criticisms I have that I feel are relevant. To my mind Missing, Presumed spends too long with too many characters. In all there are chapters told from no less than seven different characters’ perspective. While Manon takes centre stage, in that more chapters are told from her point of view than anyone else's, the number of other characters we spend time with felt like too much. The constant chopping and changing perspective made it difficult for me to warm to any one character and I never felt really felt engaged by any of them.

More galling to me was the mistakes the author made regarding the police. This wouldn't normally bother me, in fact I think some writers try too hard at accuracy with regards to police procedure, filling their pages with turgid description upon turgid description of protocol. But in the acknowledgments at the back of the book she names not one, but three serving Cambridgeshire police officers as having assisted her. She also mentions that she was given a tour of Cambridgeshire's Major Crime Unit. If you're going to boast of such access, you better get it right.

So what does the author get wrong? First off, early in the book she refers to a WPC. Female police officers haven't been WPCs in years, they're now PCs like their male counterparts. This is an especially galling error for a female author to make. But worse is her prose concerning early interviews conducted by the police with Edith's boyfriend and some of the other witnesses. Quite frankly they're what PACE (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the law which governs such things) terms "oppressive". In other words, the author has her police question these people aggressively. A little disclaimer, I have friends in the police, two serving officers and one ex-officer. I've had exhaustive conversations with them about how these things are done, and despite what is shown on the telly, British cops at least don't do aggressive interviewing. This is not a naïve point about British cops being ‘better than that’ or more ‘civilised’, it's just a fact. The scandals of miscarriages of justice of the past have forced their hand and PACE explicitly bans it. Of equal importance is that such tactics are just not as effective. What works, what the British police now do instead, is calmly draw the interviewee's story out, testing it all the while for inconsistencies. Don't believe me? Just watch footage released by the police of interviews with any famous convicted murderer. You can find such footage of interviews with Steve Wright, the Ipswich Strangler on Youtube. Even when they have the suspect bang to right, they never interview like the author describes in this book, they never get aggressive. They methodically trap the suspect in his lies, asking the same question repeatedly in different ways, prising open the gaps in their narrative. As I say, this wouldn't bother me in most novels, it's fiction after all. But if you are going to boast of your access in the acknowledgements then you're creating a hostage to fortune with any mistakes.

Having said all that, Missing, Presumed isn't a bad book. It's not a page turner exactly, but it's ok, it kept my interest. Would I recommend it? Putting aside my criticisms, if domestic noir is your thing then this might well be up your street.

3 out of 5 stars