The Quaker – Liam McIlvanney

A city torn apart.
Glasgow, 1969. In the grip of the worst winter for years, the city is brought to its knees by a killer whose name fills the streets with fear: the Quaker. He takes his next victim – the third woman from the same nightclub – and dumps her in the street like rubbish.

A detective with everything to prove.
The police are left chasing a ghost, with no new leads and no hope of catching their prey. DI McCormack, a talented young detective from the Highlands, is ordered to join the investigation. But his arrival is met with anger from a group of officers on the brink of despair. Soon he learns just how difficult life can be for an outsider.

A killer who hunts in the shadows.
When another woman is found murdered in a tenement flat, it’s clear the case is by no means over. From ruined backstreets to the dark heart of Glasgow, McCormack follows a trail of secrets that will change the city – and his life – forever…

*********

The Quaker is set in 1969 Glasgow.  It’s a fictional account of the hunt for a serial killer, very loosely based on a real case. Three women, each raped, strangled and dumped; each believed to have met their killer, reported to be a respectable looking, bible quoting man, at the Barrowland Ballroom.

Glasgow is in the grip of one of the worst winters and months of police investigation into the murders is getting nowhere. There are posters everywhere showing an artist’s impression of the Quaker’s face – a respectable looking man; the victims faces are splashed across the newspapers; rumours abound as to the Quaker’s identity. Thousands of police hours are spent following up every call, every letter written by members of the public, taking statements, crossing the city to interview possible suspects but still the investigation is getting nowhere. Following the death of the third victim, there have been no further murders but the investigating team are still going through boxes and boxes of statements trying to make connections that might solve the case. Stirred by the Press, the public are demanding results.

Against this background DI Duncan McCormack arrives on secondment from the Flying Squad to review the investigation and make recommendations. He’s not made welcome by the Quaker team. He’s an outsider in more ways than one and the team make life very difficult for him. They suspect McCormack is meant to write a report that will shut the investigation down. He gets a particularly hard time from another officer, Derek Goldie.

In the meantime safebreaker Alex Paton who has been living in London for a while is returning to Glasgow to take part in planned auction house heist. Following the robbery, Paton goes to ground in an empty top floor flat in a building due for demolition. He’s still hiding out there when a body is found in one of the ground floor flats. Police believe she’s the fourth victim of the Quaker. With the discovery of Paton’s hideout they feel they’re making progress in catching the Quaker.

There’s a lot to get your teeth into. The author manages to weave the various threads into a gritty, dark tale set in a time before social media and mobile communications. Gathering evidence was a painstaking task. It was only when I got to the end that I realised how many clues I had missed. There are also quite a few red herrings. The murder victims have a voice too, each one relating what was happening in their life around the time of their murders.

I often enjoy stories set in locations I know and I know Glasgow. I think when you are familiar with a location it’s easier to visualise events and you get more involved in the story. (Good writing helps too of course!) I hope this will just be the first of a series of books featuring DI Duncan McCormack. I think I want to know a bit more about him.

The Quaker was published on 28 June 2018 (kindle and hardback).  My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for providing a digital review copy.

Dark Water – Robert Bryndza

Beneath the water the body sank rapidly. She would lie still and undisturbed for many years but above her on dry land, the nightmare was just beginning.

When Detective Erika Foster receives a tip-off that key evidence for a major narcotics case was stashed in a disused quarry on the outskirts of London, she orders for it to be searched. From the thick sludge the drugs are recovered, but so is the skeleton of a young child.

The remains are quickly identified as seven-year-old Jessica Collins. The missing girl who made headline news twenty-six years ago.

As Erika tries to piece together new evidence with the old, she must dig deeper and find out more about the fractured Collins family and the original detective, Amanda Baker. A woman plagued by her failure to find Jessica. Erika soon realises this is going to be one of the most complex and demanding cases she has ever taken on.

Is the suspect someone close to home? Someone is keeping secrets. Someone who doesn’t want this case solved. And they’ll do anything to stop Erika from finding the truth.

*********

Robert Bryndza has rapidly become one of my favourite authors.  This is the third book in the Detective Erika Foster series and once again Rob has written a book which captured my interest right from the start.

Erika Foster has recently been transferred (rather under a cloud) from Lewisham to Bromley and is no longer with the Murder investigation unit. She is now assigned to a team that is part of Specialist, Organised and Economic Crime.

During a search of a flooded, disused quarry, searching for a consignment of drugs, the Police divers also come across a bundle of plastic entwined in chains. Inside was a small skeleton, apparently a child. The remains are eventually linked to a 7 year old girl who had gone missing without trace 26 years earlier.

Erika asks to be put in charge of case despite the fact that her unit does not deal in kidnap or murder cases. She has a good track record in solving difficult cases but her boss, Superintendent Yale, doesn’t agree to her request.

She then pleads with her old boss Commander Paul Marsh, and ultimately with the Assistant Commissioner. She is eventually put in charge of the case however she is to run it from Bromley and report directly to Paul Marsh. It soon becomes apparent there is little to go on. The investigation into the child’s disappearance didn’t get very far at the time. No one had witnessed anything. There was one suspect who was arrested and questioned, but released a few days later without charge. The female officer in charge of the missing person investigation was later thrown off the case.

Oh yes, and there appears to be someone who doesn’t want the case solved, but who and why?

I love that there is some continuity in Robert’s Erika Foster books. We meet characters (former colleagues) who appear in earlier books but we are also given a little of their background so that Dark Water can stand alone (it’s very worthwhile reading the series – they are all excellent books).

The plot is good. I love the balance between description and dialogue. I like the way we get to know a little bit more of Erika in each book (although I have to say I think she is mellowing a little!). She is an interesting character, not without her issues. She is a good police officer but sometimes deviates from standard procedures and hasn’t risen up the ranks quite as quickly as you would expect, given her success rate with difficult cases. However I got a sense that things might be starting to improve for Erika in respect of her personal relationships.

There are plenty of twists and turns and attempts to thwart the investigation. Once again great storytelling. Robert Bryndza writes my favourite kind of book – one that keeps me up to the wee small hours, bleary eyed, but desperate to find out what happens next.

I would love to read more books in this series. I hope it’s not too long until the next one is published!

Robert has also written a series of Coco Pinchard books which are funny and very entertaining.  His website can be found here.

Local Girl Missing – Claire Douglas

 

 

Twenty years ago
21-year-old Sophie Collier vanishes one night.  She leaves nothing behind but a trainer on the old pier – and a hole in the heart of her best friend Francesca.

Now
A body’s been found.  And Francesca’s drawn back to the seaside town she’s tried to forget. Perhaps the truth of what happened to Sophie will finally come out. Yet Francesca is beginning to wish she hadn’t returned.

Everywhere she turns are ghosts from her past.  The same old faces and familiar haunts of her youth.  But if someone knows what really happened to Sophie that night then now’s the time to find out – isn’t it?

Except sometimes discovering the truth can cost you everything you hold dear – your family, your sanity and even your life . . .

*********

I enjoyed reading Local Girl Missing, Claire Douglas’ second book.  It’s a psychological/mystery full of twists and turns and a very good read.

Francesca is 39 years old, living in London and a successful businesswoman involved in the running of her father’s hotel business.

Out of the blue she receives a call from the brother of her best friend Sophie who, years earlier, had disappeared late one night from a club in the seaside town where they had grown up.  It was assumed she had fallen off the town’s deserted pier and had been swept away by the tide but no body had ever been recovered.

Daniel tells her that remains have been washed up, that it might be Sophie and he persuades Francesca to return to the town to await the official identification and help him find out what had happened to his sister.

Francesca takes a few days off and reluctantly returns to Oldcliffe-on-Sea, despite having sworn never to go back. We learn that there was an incident in the past, when the the friends were 16, involving a young boy, Jason. It appears Francesca and Sophie knew what really happened but swore never to tell anyone.

Daniel arranges for Francesca to stay in a friend’s holiday apartment in a Victorian apartment block, high on a cliff top and overlooking the old pier. As it is out of season most of the flats are unoccupied. There is a sense of foreboding and uneasiness.  It was easy to imagine the bleakness of a seaside town in winter.

Memories soon start flooding back, not always welcome memories. In fact it soon appears that Francesca is not welcome either and someone is sending her poison pen messages. There are various incidents that can’t be explained. She’s terrified someone else knows what happened to Jason. There are people from the past still living in the town. She doesn’t know who’s telling the truth, who she can trust.

The author tells the story from both Francesca’s and Sophie’s point of view. Frankie’s story is set in 2016, Sophie’s story is in the form of her journal from 1997. Because of the two time frames you get to know the characters both as teenagers and as adults. There is one character from the past who is really despicable. Who has access to these diary entries? Are they sending the poison pen messages?

I liked this book – it was a well written, satisfying read – quite chilling in parts and full of twists and turns and secrets. The ending was good and not quite what I expected.

Read an extract from Local Girl Missing here.

[My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin UK – Michael Joseph for providing a review copy of this book]

Dear Amy – Helen Callaghan

 

DESCRIPTION:

Margot Lewis is the agony aunt for The Cambridge Examiner. Her advice column, Dear Amy, gets all kinds of letters – but none like the one she’s just received:

‘Dear Amy,
I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped and am being held prisoner by a strange man. I’m afraid he’ll kill me.
Please help me soon,
Bethan Avery’

Bethan Avery has been missing for years. This is surely some cruel hoax. But, as more letters arrive, they contain information that was never made public. How is this happening? Answering this question will cost Margot everything . . .

Dear Amy is a good debut psychological thriller.

It starts with the abduction of teenage schoolgirl Katie Browne who in a moment of anger had decided she was leaving home, had packed a bag, sneaked out of her house and had decided to go to her Dad’s (without telling anyone). It’s a foul, wet, windy night. A car pulls up beside her. The driver calls her name. She doesn’t know him. He offers her a lift. She declines but there is fear in her voice … Just as she’s decided to go back home and face the music she realises that someone is coming up behind her….

The story then switches to the voice of Margot Lewis, a teacher at St Hilda’s Academy who also happens to write the Dear Amy advice column in the Cambridge Examiner. Margot has no children of her own and her husband Eddie has left her for someone else.

Margot’s character seems quite proper and correct – kind of old fashioned and appears to be quite practical and very much in control. She had been Katie’s teacher at one time and was concerned about the missing girl.

Then a letter arrives at the newspaper from a Bethan Avery, who had been missing for almost 20 years, begging for help and saying she has been kidnapped and is held prisoner in a cellar. Was it a prank? Was it genuine? Was it connected to the disappearance of Katie Browne?

Margot tries to find out more about Bethan Avery and wants her to contact her again. Her search for information about Bethan becomes almost an obsession. She’s also annoyed that some people, including the Police, believe that Katie Browne has simply run away from home and Margot feels nobody is really trying to find her. Finally a criminologist called Martin Forrester contacts her regarding the letters from Bethan, telling her the Police provided her details.

As the story progresses we find out a little bit more about Margot via conversations with her soon to be ex-husband and her friend Lily who thinks Margot is taking on too much and will make herself ill.

There are some chilling moments too. A man in a car outside the school, gates, an encounter with a man in a carpark, someone watching and waiting in a car near Margot’s home, silent phone calls.

The tension builds and we see Margot starting to unravel, bit by bit, but still searching for answers in the Bethan Avery case and trying to link it to the disappearance of Katie Browne.

I quite liked the writing style and the various voices telling the story. The dialogue is generally good and although there are some wilder, slightly over the top scenarios that are just too far-fetched, overall I enjoyed this book.

[I received a review copy of Dear Amy  via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review]

 Author’s website:   http://ift.tt/1zLBc40

 

CITY ON FIRE - An Epic Novel

Well I finally finished this book.  Wow!  City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg is a sprawling, complex novel set in New York in the 1970s. It is pretty impressive for a debut novel but at 900+ pages it's a bit of a marathon read and not for the faint-hearted.

It begins in December 1976 when we are introduced to some of the characters. A pivotal event occurs on New Year's eve when a teenage girl is shot in Central Park. The book covers what happened afterwards and also what had gone before and slowly reveals the connections between the various characters in the book.  Things all come to a head on 13 July 1977 when all the lights go out in New York City.

There are a myriad of characters, many of whom are introduced in (or fall into) pairs: Charlie and Samantha, William and Mercer, Regan and Keith, Felicia Gould and her 'Demon Brother' Amory Gould, Richard and Jenny, Pulaski, Nicky Chaos and Solomon Grundy, Sewer Girl ….. and more.

The characters include a wealthy New York family and the two estranged heirs, a teacher recently arrived, two Long Island teenagers drawn to the New York punk scene, a re-formed punk band and the characters around them, a writer, the police officer investigating the shooting, a gallery owner.... and more.

I loved the way the author cleverly weaves the story to reveal the connections between the various characters (although they don't realise it at the time).

I also liked the fact that the story is told from the viewpoint of individual characters.  It also jumps backwards and forwards in time.

I thought the author described the locations really well. You could imagine yourself in these places. The characters are also very well formed and I feel you really get to know them, or at least some of them.

For all its brilliance, it's not a happy, uplifting story. It's a bit bleak in parts. It took me longer than usual to read and I came close on a couple of occasions to giving up simply because of the sheer length of the story but then the pace would change and I engaged with it again. I'm glad I read to the end and although for some characters there is a satisfactory ending for me there were still some unresolved issues.

Even as I'm drafting this review I can't decide how I feel about the book.  I suppose I could say it's brilliant in parts but the sheer length of the novel could turn it into a bit of a slog.  Overall I would say I'm glad I read it.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing me with a review copy - the book is due to be published in the UK on 22 October 2015).

Author website:               www.garthriskhallberg.com/

Author facebook page:    www.facebook.com/GarthRiskHallberg/

TRYING TO CATCH UP!

I've only just realised, I've read at least 5 books (possibly more) since I last posted here.

September has just galloped by.

I had a wonderful time singing with the Big Big Sing Community Choir at Glasgow Green for Proms in the Park (the last night of the Proms) and we even appeared live on BBC2 Scotland.

Two days after that I left for a week's holiday in Spain.  I did plenty of reading but no time for blogging!

I have recently been reading crime/thrillers/mysteries.  I enjoyed them all although they were all very different.  I was given advance copies via Netgalley but two of them have still to be published, one on 6 October and the other on 20 October so I'll put these in a separate post.


The first was The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan.

There are at least two stories going on here. On his last day at work Inspector Chopra encounters a distraught mother whose son has been found drowned and the body brought to the police station. No one seems to be investigating the matter. In fact Chopra's superior wants the case closed, saying the boy drowned. Chopra thinks the death could have been the result of foul play and wants to investigate.

On that same day Chopra had received word that he had inherited a baby elephant. When he arrives home from his last day at work the small baby elephant has been delivered. The problem is Inspector Chopra and his wife Poppy live on the 15^th floor of a tower block in Mumbai. However Chopra is one of these people who seems to be able to deal with anything that comes along. His wife Poppy seems the strong quiet type. Although they have been married for a long time they have no children but they obviously love each other.

Naturally Inspector Chopra continues to investigate the boy's death unofficially and uncovers some terrible goings on. You don't know who can be trusted and who is 'on the take' and/or involved in criminal activities.

I love the way the various threads of the story are interwoven. While investigating the boy's death he is also trying to find out how to help the baby elephant, now named Ganesha. The little elephant has a part to play in the unfolding investigation.

Also, unknown to his wife Poppy, he has been preparing for his retirement. All she knows is he take regular phone calls from someone but doesn't speak to her about them. Then when his investigation starts and he leaves the house, sometimes for several hours, she starts to think he has another woman.

I like the Chopras. They seem a charming couple.  Although it is a stand alone book the story ends leaving a door open for further books.  I'll be looking out for the next book!

It reminded me a little of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency (only very slightly, not a copy) although that was set in Botswana and the protagonist was a strong, sensible young woman and not a hardworking retired police inspector. If you liked that series of books by Alexander McCall Smith then you would probably like this book.

Her Final Breath by Robert Dugoni is the second book in a series of three.

I haven't read the first book but that didn't prevent me getting drawn into this story. There are references in Her Final Breath to events and characters in the first book but Her Final Breath can stand alone.   I thought this was a great book right from the start and having read it, I now want to read My Sister's Grave.

Tracy Crosswhite has returned to work as a detective following the retrial of her sister's killer and becomes involved in the investigation of what turns out to be a number of murders of young women in the North Seattle area.

It would also appear someone is out to get Tracy.

The suspense begins almost immediately - no long drawn out introduction to the characters before anything happens - and the tension is maintained throughout.

Clues are pretty scarce but there may be a link to an older homicide in the area.  However Tracy's attempts to investigate this further are thwarted by her boss at every turn.  Does he have something to hide?

There are lots of suspects along the way (and red herrings) but I didn't manage to guess the identity of the serial killer.

This is definitely one of these books that keeps you reading through the night just to find out who the serial killer is and if Tracy will be targeted next.

FREEBIES

Oops. Something went wrong here.  This post had reverted to draft.  It was written in the early part of August, certainly long before 25 August!

I've spent the past couple of weeks mainly reading 'free' downloads for Kindle.

I used to trawl through the Amazon 100 bestsellers (free) for Kindle.  I would 'buy' all sorts of books in the hope of finding a wee gem - and quite often there would be a book that was an excellent read.

There were others of course that were not so good, thankfully though not too many that were completely unreadable.

As I said before, nowadays I use Bookbub and The Book Hippo.  I get a daily email from each of those offering books that are either free or great bargains. Sometimes the 'bargain' is for a very limited time.   I set the criteria for books offered.  Both sites are easy to use, even my 80 year old mother can now download her Kindle books easily.

So this weeks's books were The Good Lawyer by Thomas Benigno.  A typical courtroom/crime story but a good read.  A young, ambitious lawyer, brought up with connections to the Mafia, serial rapist/murderer and the suicide of a young victim, family secrets - all cleverly connected.  I bought this book for free but I think you now have to pay.

I also read The Good Sister by Leanne Davis.  Also free when I bought it.  Again it was a good read. I suppose it is a romance but the main character is a victim of domestic abuse who is unable to escape  /leave her controlling husband.  Apparently it is the second book in a series but it was still enjoyable even although I hadn't read the first book.

Lindsay is the sister who seems to have the success: nice house, handsome husband who intends to run for state governor. Growing up she was her Father's favourite daughter and always tried her best to please him.   However she is basically a prisoner and can only do what her monster of a husband allows. She also suffers frequent vicious assaults at his hands.

Jessie on the other hand had a very troubled rebellious childhood and was hated by her father.  She now lives on the other side of the country with her husband and is expecting a baby.  She also works for a good looking vet.  Somehow her sister Lindsay is permitted to visit her sister.  Over a few weeks she blossoms and begins to find her voice.  Of course there is that good looking man.

It's a well written book, making it easy to read although the subject matter makes it quite difficult to read without feeling angry, sad, frustrated.

The book is also quite explicit so is really only suitable for adults.

I also managed to fit in another couple of books that I actully paid for.

One was The Shadow Wife by Diane Chamberlain.  I think this might be one of her earlier books but it was still enjoyable.  Her books tend to have some kind of moral dilemma.  I would say this was good romantic fiction with that dilemma.

The other book was Still Alice by Lisa Genova.  I loved this book. I haven't watched the film and I'm not sure if I will.  The book is well written and although you might think it would be depressing (it's about a Harvard Professor who is diagnosed with Alzheimers at the age of 50) I didn't find it so.  The diagnosis changes her relationships with her husband and grown children, she has to stop working sooner than she had planned,

Unfortunately Alzheimers is something that seems to be touching the lives of more and more people. I just found this book remarkable and I would definitely recommend it.