Ash mountain by Helen Fitzgerald

Fran Collins is a single mother who returns to her hometown of Ash Mountain to care for her terminally ill father. Fran does not want to go back, she hates Ash Mountain and has bad memories of the place. But she’s in a rut in her life anyway, having suffered both the breakdown of her relationship and being stuck in a dead-end job, and so can think of no excuse to put off her responsibilities to her terminally ill father. 

Upon returning with her teenage daughter, it isn’t long before the memories come flooding back. Ash Mountain is not the sort of place where the past stays buried for long. Like many a rural community, people know each other’s business and have very long memories. All this is not helped by the fact that it’s the height of a broiling summer, and set in Australia as this novel is, that can mean the threat of brush fires. As one such event breaks out,  the past threatens the present and future, the tension notches up, and things come to ahead.

Australian fiction is experiencing a surge in the same way that nordic noir did a few years back. Novels such as Jane Harper’s The Dry and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands have wet people’s appetites for fiction set under the scorching sun of Australia’s outback. Ash Mountain is not a crime novel as such, more a tense drama about a community on the edge, but is as atmospheric as Harper’s and Hammer’s novels. This is a beautifully written book and while I’ve never been to Australia so can’t say from first-hand experience, I felt it really captured and evoked an atmosphere of place (how accurate it is, is for others to say).

What I can speak to is the novel’s portrayal of a sense of life in a small town. I lived in a very small village for a good few years and while there was nothing sinister going on (at least I hope not), people did all know each other’s business and did have long memories of other families' histories. As someone who moved there from an urban environment, I found it quite a culture shock. This sense of roots, something that doesn’t exist in a city, can be hugely beneficial in that it fosters community spirit. It can also be intrusive and suffocating, especially for an outsider such as the protagonist Fran Collins (while she grew up in Ash Mountain, she moved away and then returned, so is very much considered an outsider). 

Ash Mountain is a beautifully written novel with a stark sense of place and atmosphere. A wonderful read.

4 out of 5 stars

Beneath the Streets by Adam Macqueen

February 1976, London, and Tommy Wildeblood, a former rent boy trying to move on from that life, now works entrapping men cheating on their wives. His private detective employer snaps photos of him in-flagrante with the mark, for their wives to use as evidence in divorce. It’s not a particularly honourable way to make a living, but it at least helps him to not need to go back to the streets around Piccadilly Circus (the Dilly), where rent boys ply their trade. One day Tommy is crashing in his employer’s offices - without the man knowing, he’s swiped the keys - when a man enters seeking help locating his young lover. Tommy takes the man’s money, unsure whether he’ll even do the job or do a runner. He decides to at least conduct some preliminary work on the case and before he knows it, finds himself dragged deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that stretches to the heart of the state.

I love, absolutely love, alternate history and conspiracy thrillers. Though in real life cock-up tends to be far more common than conspiracy, and generally I'm sceptical of conspiracy theories, in fiction they're great fun and always make a compelling read. I particularly enjoy works grounded in great historical moments. I’m not alone in this either; there’s a regular stream of books imagining alternate ends to the second world war and others that propose various theories behind the Kennedy assassination. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Tony Schumacher’s John Rossett trilogy, and Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle are examples of the former, while Don Delilo’s Libra, James Elroy’s Underworld USA trilogy, and Tim Baker’s Fever City are great examples of the latter. 

Amongst this genre, there are some who’ve tackled Britain’s post-war history. The best example of this is David Peace whose Red Riding quartet looked at corruption in Yorkshire around the time of the Yorkshire Ripper. His later book GB84 looked at the machinations around the 1984 Miner’s Strike. Peace’s long-awaited UKDK meanwhile, promises to fictionalise the fall of Harold Wilson and the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

It’s this forthcoming David Peace Novel that allows us to segue back to Adam Macqueen’s Beneath the Streets. This is a novel that primarily focuses on the Jeremy Thorpe scandal - indeed, its elevator pitch asks what would have happened had Thorpe succeeded in having his ex-lover murdered - but it soon encompasses the wider political events of the period. Part of the reason Thorpe’s trial was so scandalous was that Thorpe had been on the cusp of entering government. Normally the Liberals, and the Liberal Democrats now, are on the periphery of power. Thorpe’s trial however came at one of those points when they were in the position of kingmaker. The nearest modern analogy would have been if Nick Clegg had faced trial for a serious crime after the 2010 General Election when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was being negotiated.

As with books of this genre - those reimagining world war 2, Kennedy, UK politics - real historical figures and events are weaved seamlessly through the novel’s narrative and the author, a Private Eye journalist who has researched the period meticulously, includes a section at the end outlining the real events, where he’s taken fictional licence, and what we don’t know and is still the subject of speculation. 

As well as the historical and political elements, this is a novel that also looks at the injustices gay men faced in the seventies, how their lives were valued less, and how they faced discrimination by the law. This human element is well done and compelling. Beneath the Streets looks at the male prostitution that until relatively recently was a feature of the Dilly, something that really only withered away with the internet, male and female prostitution migrating to online spaces. This is a subject that I’ve become quite interested in of late after reading a non-fiction book by another Private Eye journalist, Michael Gillard. Gillard’s book, Legacy, about organised crime in London’s Soho and East End, features a gangster called Jimmy Holmes who started out as a rent boy on the Dilly only to become one of London’s leading criminals in the 1980’s and 1990’s. So I was interested to read a fictional account of the environment rent boys operated in at that time.

The author has a second novel in the works, again featuring his protagonist Tommy Wildeblood, with the intriguing title of The Enemy Within. I’m wondering what the plot will focus on and note that Seamus Milne, one-time Guardian journalist and then Jeremy Corbyn’s Director of Communications, famously published a non-fiction work by that name about MI5 infiltration of the National Union of Miners. Will Tommy Wildeblood find himself embroiled in the secret state’s war against the miners? We will have to see. I certainly look forward to reading book 2, wherever it takes us.

4 out of 5 stars 

The Creak on the Stairs by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir

When the body of a woman is discovered at a lighthouse in the Icelandic town of Akranes, it soon becomes clear that she’s no stranger to the area. Chief Investigating Officer Elma, who has returned to Akranes following a failed relationship, and her colleagues Sævar and Hörður, commence an uneasy investigation, which uncovers a shocking secret in the dead woman’s past that continues to reverberate to the present day.

This is a good, solid, slice of Nordic Noir, the crime fiction sub-genre, that along with domestic noir and psychological thrillers, continues to dominate much of the crime fiction landscape. While Nordic Noir is not as dominant as it once was, it’s still a crowded field, but there’s more than enough in this title to make it stand out.

The author imbues the novel with a very strong atmosphere and sense of place which is vividly and brilliantly portrayed. The characters are compelling, while the plot is tightly driven. Reading this novel, I had real trouble guessing who the culprit was. As another reviewer has noted, just as you think you know who it is, you're forced to reevaluate as the next twist sends the tale in another direction entirely. The plot unfolds over two twin timelines, and while that isn’t my favoured narrative technique, and it’s one that is very tricky to get right, the author pulls it off with aplomb.

As with many Nordic Noir titles, there are some difficult and disturbing issues tackled in this book, but while reader discretion is advised, personally I didn’t find them too graphic or insensitively portrayed.  

This is the first in a new series and I definitely look forward to reading book 2.

3 out of 5 stars

The Other People by C.J. Tudor

Gabe is driving home to his family when he sees his five-year-old daughter, Izzy, peering out of the rear window of an old beat-up station wagon festooned with bumper stickers. She’s supposed to be home with her mother and he gives chase, but the car gets away. He learns soon after that his wife and daughter have been murdered in their home. Gabe insists to the police that they must be wrong because he saw his daughter in a stranger’s car, but they deny that this is possible. Soon he finds himself under suspicion for his family’s murder. Years later, now exonerated, but with the murders still unsolved, Gabe spends his time living out of a camper van and driving along the motorway where he saw the station wagon, hoping to see it again.

Gabe’s story intersects with that of Katie, a waitress in a Service Station, who’s a single mother and takes pity on him. Then there’s Fran, who with her daughter Alice, is on the run. Then there’s the child in a vegetative state in a private residence who dreams, and the Samaritan, a sinister criminal who helps Gabe in his search.

Being a C. J. Tudor novel, this is a story with a strong supernatural element. Alice is afraid to look into mirrors, for when she does she falls unconscious, dreams, and the mirror shatters leaving her with a pebble which she hoards in a satchel. It’s clear from early on that she is somehow linked to the girl in the coma. But The Other People is also a crime thriller, and Gabe discovers a disturbing organisation (The Other People of the title) that organises on the Dark Web.

I won’t say more for risk of divulging spoilers, but as with the author’s previous titles, The Chalk Man and The Taking of Annie Thorne, both of which I’ve also read and reviewed, this book seamlessly blends the supernatural with crime thriller, producing a very compelling tale.

5 out of 5 stars 

The Mother Code by Carole Stivers

This is a novel that cuts between the near future and the far future (far-ish, a generation or so later). In the near future, the American military has unleashed a biological flu-like weapon against insurgents in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, it has seeped into the ecosystem and its spread is unstoppable. It soon comes to threaten the human race. In the far future, a young boy Kai is “born” from an artificial womb, his only companion his robot mother, Rho-Z. The two stories intersect, the pandemic in the near future, and the scientists' desperate search to stop it; Kai and his mother Rho-Z’s pursuit of survival and search for others like him in the far future.

On the one hand, this is an incredibly prescient book, the world locked down as it is by Corvid-19. I must admit to not having realised that the title dealt with pandemic disease when I received a copy from Netgalley, so this is a story definitely of the moment. That said, this is both a plus and a minus. It’s a plus because the storyline is current, and while Covid-19 is a coronavirus, naturally occurring, and unlikely to wipe out humankind, it has heightened our fears of deadly pandemics and has brought concerns about biological warfare to the fore (there are conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was made in a Chinese lab, which are almost certainly false). 

Unfortunately, The Mother Code fails by comparison on other levels, albeit through no fault of the author. For example, in this novel the American’s hide the pandemic from other nations and refuse to divulge the truth of the disease. We’ve seen with Covid-19 that when it comes to an existential threat, that even the Chinese, a one-party state and a secretive one at that, will share science. While the Chinese have not been totally honest, they have come in for huge criticism for this, yet in The Mother Code, the Americans are able to hide the truth of the pandemic with no problem at all. Of course, Covid-19 was not developed as a biological warfare agent and perhaps if it had, things would have been different. Even so, I can’t help but find the author’s portrayal lacking, though as I say, she wrote the novel before the current crisis so can’t be blamed for getting this wrong.

The far future elements about Kai and his mother robot Rho-Z are in many ways far more philosophical, tackling as they do questions about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. This is interesting but speculative and while the author has clearly researched the topic (not surprising, as she's a scientist herself with a PH.d. in biology) I found myself struggling to connect with it. In part, I think that's because the author wished the story to be uplifting and positive, and yet I felt that the world she had created was more suited to a dystopian tale. 

All that aside, The Mother Code is an interesting slice of sci-fi with a lot to say about the world. Apparently, movie rights have been snapped up by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, so a film version might well be on our screens too, 

3 out of 5 stars  

Habit by Stephen McGeagh

Michael is an unemployed lad in Manchester who passes the time in the jobcentre or in the pub. One day he’s out getting drunk when he meets Lee, who introduces him to her “Uncle” Ian. One thing leads to another and he gets a job as a doorman at a massage parlour in the city’s Northern Quarter. One night he witnesses the very violent death of one of the punters and he’s soon sucked into a world that he doesn’t understand and knew nothing about.

This is a novel for anyone who's wondered what goes on behind various dodgy doors. When in my twenties, I used to go out a lot in London’s Soho, which had a great number of bars and clubs. Soho has cleaned up a lot since it’s infamous heyday in the 1960s, but there are still a number of “walk-ups” - flats that host prostitutes - and clip joints. These were often forbidding and seedy doorways and one couldn’t help but wonder what went on inside them.

This is a novel that answers that question, albeit in a Quentin Tarantino/George Romero-esque way. This is a disturbing, but also brilliantly imagined novel, and while none of the protagonists are particularly likeable, they’re all very compelling. This is a short novel, just under 200 pages, but it’s wonderfully written, and if you like your fiction dark and chilling, then this is a must-read.

Habit has also been made into a film, apparently, and while I haven't seen it yet, having read and enjoyed the novel, I'm definitely going to seek it out.

5 out of 5 stars 

Project XX by Mickey J Corrigan

Massacres committed by perpetrators with firearms are all too common in the United States, so much so that they have a hideous euphemism, the “active shooter” (in part one suspects that this is due to resistance to gun control, the term used to somehow distance thought from the real problem: widespread gun ownership). Unsurprisingly as most violent crime is committed by men, most such massacres are committed by men also. Project XX imagines a disturbed young woman plotting such a crime.

The protagonist of Project XX, Aimee Heller, is a nerdy 17-year-old girl who studies hard and is good at sport. But when she starts to resist her mother as to which colleges she should go to and fails to get into the ones her mum wants, things start to change. Aimee has always done what her mum wants and now the tension between the two, and between Aimee and the world around her, manifests in disturbing ways. She meets and becomes friends with a young woman who’s a social outcast, who calls herself H8ter, and who doesn’t appear to go to college or have a job. Slowly the two start to turn against the world and plot to do the unthinkable.

I don’t want to divulge any spoilers so I won’t say anymore, but Project XX has been compared to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fightclub, the film Heather’s, and Brett Easton Ellis’ work. I can certainly see the comparison to some of these. This is a disturbing read but certainly very compelling.

4 out 4 stars