Snap

The Lady Vanishes

British novelist Belinda Bauer’s Snap was longlisted for the Man Booker Award last year, one of the rare suspense books to be included in that hallowed roll.

The opening chapter of the novel is harrowing—eleven-year-old Jack is left in charge of his two younger sisters, Joy and Merry, in the family’s battered car, while his mother goes off to make a call. Hours pass and she does not return; the car gets hot, the kids are hungry and scared. Jack gets out of the car with the two little girls to search for their mother, and, it is a measure of a society’s callousness, that cars whizz past the three traumatized kids and nobody stops to help.

Much later, the mother’s body is found in a deserted spot. The father, unable to cope with the tragedy abandons the kids to their fate and disappears. Jack does not want to approach the authorities for fear of the siblings being sent to different foster homes by social workers. He tries look after them, but there is only so much a penniless child can do. When they are dying of starvation, Louis, a burglar, finds them, takes Jack under his wing and teaches him to become an expert thief too. Jack’s modus operandi is to steal food for the homes he breaks into, and take naps in their beds; in his own home, he is plagued by nightmares about his mother’s disappearance. The baffled cops label him Goldilocks.

The kids pretend their father is out on work and that they are being home schooled; to prevent prying, Jack keeps the exterior of their home in impeccable condition, while inside is a mess of newspapers that Joy refuses to throw away. It is her way of coping, while five-year-old Merry, clutches a pet tortoise, compulsively mows the lawn and reads vampire books.

In a parallel story, Catherine, a pregnant woman, alone at home as her husband, Adam travels on business, finds her house broken into and a knife let by her bedside with a threatening note. For a reason she cannot explain even to herself, she does not tell her husband or the cops about the incident.

Detective Inspector John Marvel, a homicide expert, bristling at the transfer from London to Somerset, and unhappy at the downgrade to solving burglaries, is, nevertheless involved in the case, and even thinks up a scheme to trap Goldilocks.

 Marvel’s colleague Reynolds, listens distractedly to his mother telling him about three wild and unsupervised kids next door, but does not act on it. Jack allows himself to be caught to bargain for solving his mother’s murder, for which he has provided clues. Marvel, longing to solve a murder, gets his wish, and the chance to interact with the amazingly smart and resourceful fourteen-year-old thief.

Bauer mixes suspense, action and a compassion for the three kids in a thoroughly engrossing novel—maybe not Booker-worthy, but excellent in its own way.

Snap

By Belinda Bauer

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Pages: 352

The Infinite Blacktop

Hard-Boiled Detective

Sara Gran’s tough-yet-vulnerable protagonist, Claire DeWitt, belongs to the best tradition of those never-say-die, hard-boiled detectives of classic noir crime fiction. A female version of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler’s world-weary private eyes.

Right at the start of the third novel in the series, The Infinite Blacktop, Claire’s car is rammed into, and she is shocked that somebody tried to kill her. Trusting her own judgment over the efficiency of the police investigation (because cops hate her), she escapes in wounded condition from the ambulance.

The book goes back and forth over three different cases at different stages of Claire’s life, including the unsolved disappearance of her friend Tracy, with whom she solved cases as a teen detective, inspired by the comics featuring “Cynthia Silverton, teen sleuth and girl detective.”

Then, as Claire reminisces, “I became the best detective in the world, just like I’d dreamed of. I met kings and I met magicians. . . . I met people who had everything on earth except the one thing they wanted the least but needed the most — the truth. “

Claire claims she solved every single case, except Tracy’s, and gave each a peculiar   name like “The Clue of the Watercolor Butterfly,” “The Case of the Bitten Apple,” “The Case of the Broken Lily,” “The Happy Burger Murder Case.”

A few days before the hit-and-run, Claire had, on a hunch, answered an ad in one of the old comics that offered a “home-study course . . . to earn your detective’s badge from the comfort of your own home,” and sent her application to the address provided in Los Angeles. She realizes that the car that rammed into hers had Nevada number plates and after stealing a car and a credit card (she is a skilled and guilt-free thief) she heads to LA.

At some point, to earn her PI licence in California, she had picked up a cold case of the murder of an artist, that turned out to be a complicated affair. Everything seems linked to those comics and a book titled Detection, written by a French detective, Jacques Silette, who was ridiculed for his efforts, but also generated a small group of followers, who are called Silettians.

As the three cases converge, Claire goes through a lot of existential angst and philosophical musings, but her mind is always alert and her body, even in battered condition, is ready for a fight. Written with wry humour and brisk pace, The Infinite Blacktop was on a few lists of the best books of 2018. Deservedly so.

The Infinite Blacktop

By Sara Gran

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 304

Dark Sacred Night

Ballard Meets Bosch

In The Last Show, Michael Connelly had introduced a fiery new female character, Renee Ballard,  an LAPD cop, who chose to accept the night shift rather than put up with sexual harassment from a senior.

 In the second book, Dark Sacred Night, featuring her—this bright and brave woman, who lives in a tent on the beach and surfs like it were a religion—she meets Connelly’s old hero, Harry Bosch (he was introduced back in 1992 in The Black Echo and has featured in 20 books before). He has retired from the force, but still works cold cases for the San Fernando Police Department, mainly to keep loneliness at bay. His wife is dead and his only daughter is away at college. He just needs to be busy, and doesn’t care that his office is a former holding cell for drunks.

Both characters are very good at their jobs, but melancholy loners in their personal lives; it was a stroke of genius to have them meet and work together. The age gap ensures there will be no romance, and neither is looking for a surrogate family, so there is no dad-daughter vibe either. They just click and form an informal team.

On returning to the desk at the Hollywood Division, after solving a particularly unpleasant case, Renée sees a grey-haired man skulking around the office, and going through another detective’s filing cabinet. She confronts him and finds that he is looking for old notes on the Daisy Clayton murder, and that he is former LAPD cop, Harry Bosch. The case, which obsessed him in the last novel, Two Kinds Of Truth, is about Daisy, a fifteen-year-old hooker, who was found murdered nine years ago, her body callously dumped in a trash bin. Bosch got involved in the case, to the extent of continuing the investigation on his own, giving shelter to Daisy’s drug-addicted mother in his home and helping her get clean.

Ballard, always up for a challenge, and not too tied up with active cases, muscles into Bosch’s domain, first by going through cartons full of field notes—or shake cards as they are called by cops—by officers on duty at the time Daisy was murdered, and then following leads.

Bosch is also trying to find out who carried out a hit on a gang boss in the San Fernando Valley, and who managed to find out about his informer and killed him. Thebook may be dark and violent, but it is action-packed, with a razor’s edge rescue sequence that is brilliantly written. The Ballard and Borsch partnership works wonderfully well, with his experience and her quick-thinking—they are on equal footing, no sexism or ageism comes in the way. 

Connelly reportedly wants to write a book with Ballard and his other popular series hero, Mickey ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ Haller, Bosch’s half-brother and frequent go-to guy. One can hardly wait!

Dark Sacred Night

By Michael Connelly

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 448

Kingdom Of The Blind

Three Pines Revisited

The bleak, snowy winters do not hamper the warmth of the people of Three Pines, the fictional Canadian village, that Louise Penny created for bestselling novels about Armand Gamache—the cop who rose over fourteen books to become the Head of the Surete in the French Canadian city of Quebec. In the last book, Glass Houses, he was suspended from his post, ironically for doing his job too well, because he stepped over some inconvenient lines.

In the latest, Kingdom Of The Blind, he is still off-duty, but has not stopped working on the case that led to his suspension. Meanwhile, his wife Reine-Marie and his friends in Three Pines keep him sane. The popular watering hole of the village is run by Gabri and Olivier, who provide excellent food, wine, hospitality and emotional support to all those who gather at their bistro, including the batty, old poet Ruth Zardo and her pet duck.

When this book opens, Gamache has received a mysterious invitation from a lawyer—who happens to be dead-- to come to an isolated farmhouse a few miles away from the village. He drives there in terribly inclement weather to be confronted by a derelict structure that looks like it could collapse any minute. If that is not disconcerting enough, Gamache’s neighbour Myrna Landers (owner of the village book shop) turns up too, having being summoned by a letter by the same lawyer. The two are joined by an oddly-dressed young construction worker, Benedict, who had also got a similar letter. The three are completely mystified to learn, from the late lawyer’s son, Maitre Mercier, a notary, that they have been named as executors of the will of a dead woman none of them knew.

The woman, Bertha Baumgartner, worked as a cleaning lady but insisted on being called Baroness, claiming to belong to European aristocracy. She left her three children huge sums of money, that she could not possibly have had. Out of curiosity, the three of them agree to take up the assignment. A storm makes it impossible for Benedict to leave, so he stays back to enjoy the generosity of the Gamaches. Then, the oldest Baumgartner son is found dead in the house that finally falls down, and murder is suspected.

Meanwhile, the problems from the last case are still in existence—the drugs Gamache had to let into the country in order to break a huge narcotics ring, threaten to hit the streets any day and kill thousands of people, unless they can be traced before that happens. Gamache has to descend into the Montreal underworld to hunt for the missing drugs, as his trusted deputy and beloved son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir faces pressure from higher-ups to betray Gamache and save his own career.

Penny writes with love and empathy for her characters, whether it’s the beleaguered Gamache, Beauvoir or the scrappy young woman, Amelia Choquet, whom the senior cop pulled off the streets, and inducted into the police force, in spite of her past as a hooker and junkie. If Gamache is capable of incredible kindness, he is also equally capable of cruelty, as he takes unpopular decisions to stop the impending disaster.

Kingdom Of The Blind is a wonderful book by a writer who expertly blends into a story of violence and destruction, her ingredients of lyricism, philosophy and pointers on how to live better. If Three Pines actually existed, it would be a tourist attraction for fans of Louise Penny’s books.

Kingdom Of The Blind

By Louise Penny

Publisher: Minotaur

Pages: 400

Alaskan Holiday

Romancing The Snow

Bestselling author Debbie Macomber’s latest, Alaskan Holiday, is a lightweight romance, a quick-read-and-forget sort of novel about an aspiring chef, Josie Avery, who takes up a short-term job of cooking in a resort in Ponder, a remote Alaskan town. She befriends the shy and quiet Palmer Saxon, who lives alone and makes beautiful swords to order. 

Till Josie arrived, Palmer was content with his life in Ponder. He falls madly in love with Josie, and is encouraged by his gluttonous friend, Jack Corcoran, to propose marriage to her. Josie is attracted to Palmer, but does not want to give up her ambition and her busy life in Seattle to be stuck in Ponder, which is snowed under and inaccessible for the better part of the year.

She misses the last ferry out of Ponder before the town shuts down for the winter, and after her anger dies down, she is forced to spend time with Palmer and Jack, and faces a dilemma—whether she should sacrifice her hard-won career opportunities for love, or give up a unique man like Palmer for the chance to work with a famous chef. Macomber describes the dreamy beauty of Alaska, but the love story has predictable up and downs and ends exactly like it is expected to.  Not one of Macomber’s better books.

Alaskan Holiday

By Debbie Macomber

Publisher: Ballantine

Pages: 256

Two By Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz & Hawthorne

Anthony Horowitz is a bestselling author, who has written two Bond thrillers, Trigger Mortis and Forever And A Day, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The House Of Silk, his own very popular Alex Rider series for young adults among other novels, TV series and films. He worked himself into the book, The Word Is Murder, when he reluctantly undertakes to write a crime book featuring, a former (he was fired for attacking a paedophile) police detective Daniel Hawthorne, who has been consultant on a TV series written by Horowitz.

Horowitz does not quite like Hawthorne, who has the uncanny ability to read his mind (and annoyingly calls him Tony), but does not share too many details about his own life. The two are thrown together again in the aptly titled, The Sentence Is Death, into which the detective makes a grand entry right into a complicated scene of the TV serial that is being shot on a London street.

When a celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Pryce is found dead in his home, his head bashed with an expensive bottle of wine (he is a teetotaler), Hawthorne is summoned to investigate in his new role as a consultant to the police on ‘sticky’ cases, and he strings along Horowitz to write the second book based on this case.

The lawyer obviously had many enemies but the main suspect is Akira Anno an unpleasant writer of pretentious books, who had poured wine on Pryce’s head in a restaurant and threatened to kill him with the bottle, because she felt he got her a raw deal in her divorce from real estate millionaire, Adrian Lockwood.

As the enigmatic Hawthorne, with a curious-but-resentful Horowitz as his sidekick, start investigating, the list of suspects grows. To make it worse for the writer, he is attacked by the nasty cop Cara Grumshaw, who does not want Hawthorne to get credit for solving the case.

In the last book, Horowitz was astonished to discover that Hawthorne has a hobby making model planes, in this one he is even more surprised that the lone-wolf kind of cop is also a member of a book club. The writer is forced to address one of the sessions, in the home of genial Bengali lady and her computer wiz son—the ex-cop’s secret helper.

The novel is cleverly plotted, with large doses of humour and an enigmatic detective who knows more than he is willing to let on, even to his ‘biographer.’ In the book, Horowitz reveals that he signed a three-bookdeal for the Hawthorne-led crime stories and often regrets it; but readers would be pleased if there were more books with this writer-cop partnership.

The Sentence Is Death

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Century

Pages: 400

********************

Bond Begins

Readers have enjoyed Ian Fleming’s spy thrillers and seen the films, but very little is actually known about how James Bond came to be 007, with a Licence to Kill.

Anthony Horowitz, writing his second Bond novel after Trigger Mortis, goes bravely into an origin story. Forever And A Day is set before Casino Royale, when James Bond is a fledgling intelligence agent and not yet 007. 

The 007, whose number he inherits, turns up dead in the French Riviera at the start of this book. Young James Bond, who has successfully carried out an assassination of a traitor in Stockholm, is promoted by M (who is still a male and not the book version of Dame Judy Dench) to the small and elite group of spy-hitmen in the Double 0 programme, and sent off to find out what happened to his predecessor.

It is only a matter of time before he meets the mandatory femme fatale in a casino, a beautiful (of course!) woman called Sixtine. She is an expert at cards and prefers her martinis “shaken not stirred,”—so now we know where that signature line came from.

Sixtine is an enigmatic Mata Hari type, who knows everyone and everything—including who Bond is and why he is in Monte Carlo. Once this secret is out, Bond hits it off with Sixtine and the end up in bed (of course!) even as she is dating American millionaire, Irwin Wolfe. 

Bond has been described in one of the later films as a “sexist, misogynistic dinosaur,” but here he is told by Sixtine (in a post #MeToo world, though the story is set in the 1950s), at whom he makes a silly pass, “I want to make it clear that you are never to touch me again without asking.”

The Bond Villain is a Corsican Italian gangster, and drug lord—a very, very fat man called Jean-Paul Scipio, who, speaks only Corsican, so carries an interpreter with him at all times, and  declares, “I have total control here in Marseilles, the port, the city, the police, the justice system? It is all mine!” 

There are many action scenes and car chases around hairpin bends, and a luxurious cruise liner where Bond finds himself imprisoned at some point, which are meant for the screen, should the book be turned into a film.

As with his previous Bond book, Trigger Mortis, Horowitz was given some original material by the Fleming estate, the outline for a TV series that was never made, and he builds expertly on that, including Fleming’s story as a ‘flashback’ in this book, an incident that took place at the casino where he meets Sixtine.

James Bond may wear elegant suits, drive a fancy car and have a housekeeper make his breakfast just so, but he still at a stage where he has a lot of learning to do, and Sixtine turns out to be a major influence (she even teaches him which brand of cigarettes to smoke!). Horowitz’s fast-paced and very readable novel pays homage to Fleming, but also imagines what James Bond was like, before he got comfortable in his role as 007. Bond fans should be happy that Bond lives on.

Forever And A Day

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Pages: 304