WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
Whipped By William Deverell ECW, 392 pages, $28.95
At one time in the seventh book in William Deverell’s smart, funny and cleverly-plotted series featuring the ace barrister Arthur Beauchamp, he says that, especially now in virtual retirement, he experienced “a feeling of being fully alive again” only when he walked into a courtroom.
That sentiment somewhat applies to readers too; as they come most alert in the passages when he shows his wonderful forensic style before judge and jury. All this makes “Whipped” an exception in the series. Beauchamp’s client is his wife, Margaret Blake, MP and national leader of the Green party, who is sued for slander by an odious Conservative cabinet minister.
Lively and racy as the case is, it provides Beauchamp not nearly as much chance as usual to work his courtroom sleight of hand, apart, from a dazzling piece of examination for discovery of the slimy Tory. But, no matter, the rest of the narrative back home on Garibaldi Island packs more than the usual volume of rustically-comic incidents involving all the usual nutty characters with a few extras thrown into for very good measure.
Idyll Fears By Stephanie Gayle Seventh Street, 321 pages, $15.95
You can’t blame Tom Lynch for feeling cranky, an emotion that frequently roils him. The year is 1997, and Lynch is the police chief in the Connecticut town of Idyll. He also happens to be gay, something the town rarely lets him forget. “I don’t mind being gay,” he says, “but I do get tired of everybody honing in on it.” Lynch arrives at the Idyll job from his native New York where he worked for the NYPD. He brings his big-city detecting smarts to the small town where, it turns out, he needs them to solve a fiendishly elusive crime. The nasty stuff centres on a boy with a rare disease who has apparently been kidnapped. The case, trickily structured by author Stephanie Gayle, presents an involving adventure and places front and centre an attractive central character in the person of the beleaguered gay chief.
Keep Her Safe By Sophie Hannah Morrow, 352 pages, $33.50
In this eccentric, though appealing book, a wife and mother from rural Hertfordshire takes a holiday at a very high-end Arizona resort, where she spots a teenage girl who was supposed to have been murdered a decade earlier. The girl’s parents doing time for the killing have long claimed their innocence. The Hertfordshire visitor sets out to solve the mystery, but she’s not the book’s sole sleuth. A loudmouthed Nancy Grace-type TV personality has made the case her own crusade, and another guest at the resort, a real Nosy Parker, also inserts herself into the investigation. All of this makes for often amusing and always complex story-telling of a pleasantly bizarre sort.
Friend Request By Laura Marshall Grand Central, 375 pages, $22.99
What happens when teen rivalries turn nasty and stretch into adulthood? That’s the crux of Laura Marshall’s well-developed first novel. It alternates between 1989: when the girls in a Norwich town prey on classmates who don’t measure up; and 2016 when they meet each other at a class reunion. Death enters into the mix — murder perhaps? — but what Marshall is particularly adept at is concocting mysteries that are convincing enough to keep the reader involved and puzzled until the book’s climax.