Country Style’s Annabel Lawson is enthralled by two new gripping murder mysteries, plus an epic saga following the trials of a Polish family during and after the events of World War II.
FROM A COMPETITIVE FIELD THIS MONTH, ANNABEL LAWSON HAS CHOSEN A BLOCKBUSTER SAGA AND TWO MURDER MYSTERIES, ONE A HOOT, THE OTHER GRADUALLY EXPOSING TRUTHS WHICH AFFECT US ALL.
ALL THAT’S DEAD
Stuart Macbride, Harper Collins, $32.99
Detective Sergeant Roberta Steel hates men and is disobedient and insolent. DC Stewart ‘Tufty’ Quirrel has the attention span of a two-yearold. We all know a Detective Sergeant Simon Rennie – middle management, he raises laziness to an art form. Superintendent Bevan is busy crocheting a garment for a soft toy. How their place of work – an Aberdeen branch of the Grampian Police Force – manages to recruit anyone is a mystery. Even though this is the 12th episode in the Inspector Logan Mcrae series, it’s a good time to begin reading. Mcrae has just returned from a year’s sick leave. The stab wounds still feel like a boar’s tusk. He’s now Professional Standards OC, which sounds cushy – a desk, video games, a cuppa? Not a bit of it. Unpopular Professor Nicholas Wilson (why do I get the feeling Stuart Macbride despises academics?) is found butchered, probably because he supports Scotland staying in the United Kingdom. Just about everyone else in Aberdeen wants out. With a couple of state lotteries, they could go it alone. Masks and nitrile gloves notwithstanding, policing is squelchy work. (Severed hand – bad, hand lost in the mail – very bad.) You swallow hard and go along with it, because there’s laughter on every page. I’m not in the least bit fooled by the cosy domestic scene at the end. Mcrae will be up to his neck in the proverbial just as soon as Macbride unleashes episode 13.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE DAY
Eleanor Wasserberg, 4th Estate, $29.99
A couple of glimpses for you from a stirring novel about a Polish family during WWII and after. At the darkest point of the drama, there is respite. Of a kind. A shuttered train comes to a halt after a seven-day journey and, instead of the expected crematorium, blue skies are waiting for its passengers.
Russian soldiers tell the prisoners via a translator that they don’t want to kill them: “They just want you to work.” A posh mother must chop down trees from dawn to dusk. However, her daughter is sent to school. “Ask Stalin and he’ll provide for you,” says the brainwashed art teacher. The daughter, who wants to be an artist, asks for brushes and paints and, lo, miraculously, they arrive. Teacher beams. “He cares for all of us.” Towards the end of the novel, when 70 years have gone by, two men meet for the first time in Krakow. Marc is the son of Adam Oderfeldt, who escaped Nazi rule and then foolishly tried to go back and paid a price. George is Adam’s grandson, raised in England and knowing little of what happened before he was born. They are about to see two pre-war paintings of a 13-yearold girl in a red dress – Marc’s halfsister and George’s aunt. The reader, by now, knows the events which transformed that young girl, but for Marc and George, the full story, so intriguing and indelible in every detail, has somehow been lost forever.
THE NIGHT SWIM
Megan Goldin, Michael Joseph, $32.99
In Megan Goldin’s new novel, we meet Rachel Krall, who keeps a low profile because her crime podcasts deal with hot issues. She’s proved herself to be as capable as Miss Marple at spotting clues the detectives on a case have missed. The trial of a young athlete charged with rape draws Krall to North Carolina and a small town where gossip is rife. Someone is stalking her. She finds a letter on her car windscreen, another one pinned to a jetty, and yet another tucked into the bedspread in her hotel room. The stalker does not threaten. She wants justice for her sister, whom she believes was murdered 25 years ago. It’s when two totally unrelated themes connect that Rachel realises she’s made herself a target. After The Escape Room, which was about skulduggery at the workplace, I was eager to see where Goldin would go next. Her signature trait – skilfully, stealthily putting the narrative into reverse – beguiles once again.
“Though this is the 12th episode in the Inspector Logan Mcrae series, it’s a good time to begin reading.”