Great summer reads by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books at Port Elliot

Sizzling summer book reviews

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness

by Malcolm Pryce

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 978140889529 $29.99

It’s 1948 and Jack Wenlock’s young life appears to be following the unhappy trajectory of the British Empire which produced him, the latter never having been the same since the silver roast beef trolley was buried at the Singapore Golf Club, ahead of the advancing Japanese. A railway detective in the age of steam, Jack is dismissed when the railways are nationalised, leaving him to face a precarious financial position while avoiding the murderous Room 42, a shadowy organisation bent on his demise. Fortunately, Jack is contacted by a countess with a brief to track her errant son Curtis, said to be suffering from ‘late-flowering Bohemianism’ in the Orient having left a successful position managing the smelting of tin golliwog badges in Malaya. With the case comes much needed funding, along with news of the mother he had long thought dead and a chance to track her down. With Jenny, his plucky and resourceful new wife beside him, Jack sets sail for the East, travelling to Singapore and Siam in search of Curtis, his past and some hope for a future. Here is an old-fashioned adventure story, studded with irony and absurd humour, tiptoeing along the line of the real and the fanciful and evoking fond memories of RM Ballantyne, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse and Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Its familiarity, even as it surprises and astonishes, is a perfect antidote to troubled times.

The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare Published by Harvill Secker ISBN 9781787301764 $32.99

A slow-burning philosophical thriller set among Oxford’s libraries and learning. Former journalist John Dyer has returned to research and write a book on Brazil, where he had lived and worked and established a family. At the exclusive private school he attended and where he has now enrolled his son, he strikes up a series of relationships with members of the international elite who make up its parental cohort. The potential discovery by one of their number, an Iranian, of physics’ holy grail agitates their lives and a quiet, but ruthless struggle to capture his discovery ensues. Dyer finds himself unwittingly involved: ‘a bit player caught, for the briefest of flashes, cringing in the headlights of a juggernaut.’ Caught in the depths of a dismal winter, the setting is lovingly and familiarly described, imbuing the book with a powerful sense of place and enhancing its literary qualities and thematic approach. It is the sort of ‘entertainment’ that recalls Graham Greene, with the thrills and intrigue at the surface more than the core. A twisting storyline keeps the pages turning but at its heart this is a work about the human condition: assessing points of interaction between our fortunes, our motives and our pasts which form ‘the loose strands out of which any life is stitched.’

Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (an imprint of Hachette) ISBN 9781474601832 $32.99

Themes of passion and revenge are explored in this work of crime fiction set on Normandy’s windswept coast. An antidote to the cool mercilessness of Scandinoir, its storyline presses up against the outer limits of the genre, brimming with tantalising intrigues, alluring women and outrageous twists. Little wonder the police are confounded. No stranger to Camus’ famous novel, the author has selected a disabled and victimised Arab youth as the book’s narrator and chief protagonist. Jamal Salaoui dreams of becoming the first disabled athlete to run an ultra-marathon. Training one morning, he fatefully encounters an obviously distressed girl on the cliff face who, despite his efforts to help her, plunges to the cobbled beach below. A natural suspect in the foul play and fatefully destined to poor decision-making

borne of his treatment by others in the past, he finds himself drawn into a decade old mystery with impossible parallels. Desperately trying to find the solution that will clear him of both crimes, Jamal must evade the police, crusading relatives and his own flawed memories. Well drawn and developed characters combine with a strong sense of place and time to render highly entertaining and effortless reading from a fabulously complex plot.

The Force

by Don Winslow

Published by HarperCollins ISBN 9781460753576 $24.99

Celebrated crime writer, Don Winslow, has moved from west coast surf noir to the Big Apple to write the quintessential cop novel. Centred around a special task force unit within the NYPD, it explores the culture of this particular thin blue line and the even thinner line defining right from wrong in a North Manhattan maelstrom of drugs, gangs, guns, money and influence. very cloistered and insular group of students and academics at Columbia University in New York, centred around its narrator Nell, a thirty-year-old whose doctoral botany studies on poisonous plants have just been terminated. Among New York City’s teeming millions, we meet only the teacher she worships, her former boyfriend, her best friend and a small group of others, as if they had been placed under her microscope lens, scrutinised as both individuals and types. Densely written as a devotional confession to her mentor whom she loves unrequitedly, its pages are packed with personal and social observations delivered in tones ranging from archly witty, through blandly declamatory to deeply poignant. Observe ‘we were young and now we’re idiots’ as a succinct identification of the gracelessness of ageing, while also considering ‘all of the order and intention and menace’ inherent in spreadsheets. While the style tips over at times to threaten the book’s coherence, its quest for beauty and joy in rather infertile ground is enjoyable and it is written in a startling, memorable voice. It will charm in all of its quiet weirdness.

Filled with brash ‘wise-guy’ dialogue, littlerestrained violence and directed by a wildly spinning moral compass, this is a hypermacho world in which only a certain type can survive, much less prosper. The action is exhaustingly brisk; there is nothing cosy about the lives lived here or the crimes they commit. Denny Malone (from Irish stock, naturally) is a task force leader operating on the edge of the city’s defences, where lives, black or otherwise, don’t really matter. A hero, the castle he has built begins to crumble under its own weight of corruption, hubris and greed, dragging all that he knows and loves down with it. Crackling, gritty entertainment as always, and a cautionary tale of police lives in the big city where survival is the order of each day.

Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Published by Faber & Faber ISBN 9781526622310 $23.99