In pursuit of her demons
In the latest Vera novel, the detective seeks killers – and the truth about her dad.
We’re a big fan of the telly series Vera. We love Brenda Blethyn’s Vera Stanhope – a sturdy, plain detective inspector with a short temper and a warm heart, who eats too much junk food and has never been known to turn down a dram. So it is a bit odd that I’ve never read Ann Cleeves’ Vera novels, of which the latest is THE SEAGULL
(Macmillan, $29.99). The Seagull was a nightclub in Whitley Bay, in England’s north-east, where what passed for the racy set – including Vera’s late father, Hector – once held court. He was a collector of rare birds’ eggs, a taxidermist and a crook. The Vera of the series and the Vera of the novels has a complicated relationship with his ghost and hence her past, which she has always avoided examining.
In The Seagull, Vera is forced to confront that past when a former bent copper she helped put away tips her off about a body. The search for the murderer fuels a plot as solid and likeable as Vera, but her real search is for the “real” Hector – and his lasting influence on his daughter.
Like the telly series, a large part of the Vera novels’ enduring and endearing success is that there is always a murder, but never any nasty gory crimes, such as cutting out people’s eyeballs.
In Tess Gerritsen’s 12th Rizzoli and Isles thriller, I KNOW A SECRET (Bantam Press, $37), a young woman who makes horror films is found dead with – you guessed it – her eyeballs cut out and placed in her left hand. That is fairly grisly and so is the next death: a chap found shot through with arrows. But the gruesome actions didn’t kill the victims and forensic pathologist Maura Isles has no idea what did. The trail will lead her to old flame and forbidden love of her life, Catholic priest Daniel Brophy.
But the series is really about the long-time friendship between Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli, and Gerritsen is good at depicting female relationships. The two women, at the top of their respective games in a male-dominated world, look out for each other. They try – and fail – to stop each other making bad choices (do not get in touch with your dying serial-killer mother, do not have sex with a Catholic priest, and so on).
This good rip-along thriller, nicely written and well paced, is exactly what
I’ve come to expect from Gerritsen. I could have done without the eyeballs.
British writer Robert Harris’s recent work has something a bit hit-andmiss about it. He’s billed as the master of the intelligent thriller, but what he’s become, certainly with his past three novels, is master of the what-if novel that ends with a damp squib rather than a big bang. His previous book, Conclave, on the choosing of a new pope, raced breathlessly towards a preposterous fizzle, and his latest, MUNICH (Hutchinson,
$38), mostly trots to an apologetic afterthought of a fizzle.
Its grand historic canvas is the infamous 1938 Munich Conference, which saw Britain and France sell out Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and concluded with British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper and declaring,
“It’s peace for our time.”
Hugh Legat is a minor private secretary in Downing Street. His old friend from Oxford, Paul von Hartmann, is a German foreign ministry flunky, but also a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. He has an agenda and needs Legat’s help. Perhaps history will be changed.
There’s a nicely turned observation: returning to Britain, Chamberlain greets the press’s flashing cameras and is a “jagged black figure at the centre of a great bright light, his arm stretched out, like a man who had thrown himself on to an electrified fence”. If only Harris’s what-if had the same shocking charge.
They try – and fail – to stop each other making bad choices (don’t get in touch with your dying serialkiller mother, don’t have sex with a Catholic priest).