Tag: mystery

S. W. Perry, Berlin Duet (Corvus 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207600035-berlin-duet?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=tZhLx8zAtO&rank=1

WWII has a devastating effect on two families, leaving pain and unspoken secrets

1938 English spy Harry Taverner spends the night dancing with a married woman, Jewish photographer Anna Cantrell. He is her case officer. Love doesn’t enter the picture; there is a war on.
1942 Anna is hiding from her Austrian Nazi husband. Harry wants her to come in from the cold and escape with her recovering cocaine-addict mother and her two children.
After the war they reunite. Anna is searching the ruins of Berlin for her missing children.
1989 The elderly Harry witnesses the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he ‘has a turn’. His daughter Elly comes to look after him. In a lucid moment, he looks at one of Anna’s old photographs. He and Anna are bound together by a secret. ‘It’s time you knew,’ he says to Elly.
Anna and her parents are artists, but her life is haunted by the toxicity of their relationship. And she enters into another one herself with Ivo. The couple lives with Marion, witnessing her dysfunction.
The narrative jumps around in time from chapter to chapter, which serves to open up to us, bit by bit, building to a crescendo, the pain in people’s pasts. The night Anna ‘finds out’ about her father Rex, forced to see things by a drunken Marion, is burned into her heart.
As Hitler goes from bad to worse, we feel the fear. The conflict between Ivo’s Naziism and Anna’s Jewishness heats up. The rift logs one injury, then another. The ways in which the Nazi terror plays out within Anna’s family are horrifying. We see it through Anna’s eyes, then Elly, hearing the story.
It is beautifully written, encapsulating the most painful of human emotions and the devastating effect world events can have on families. I’ve read many novels about families torn apart by WWII and fascism. This one is something special.
This review appeared first in Historical Novels Review.

Garth Hallberg, The Eleventh Grieve (The Reason for Everything Press 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136769306-the-eleventh-grieve?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=mCW1NrafFT&rank=1

‘There are no oysters, sir,’ the waiter informs him, but what Jake Krimmer wants to know is, ‘Since when?’ He makes his living off meteorological disasters—droughts, tidal waves and forest fires. He collects ‘congestion revenue’ in cases of bottlenecks in the power grid; he has purchased the Financial Transmission Rights (FTRs).
The girl with indigo eyes he met at a cocktail party, Rita ‘Ten Grieve’, calls it ‘climate change’, but he prefers to call it ‘weird weather’. His mother calls it ‘making a living off of other people’s misery’.
His right-hand-gal is ex-girlfriend, meteorologist Sam. Sam predicts a big twister coming to Norman, Oklahoma, and Krimmer hopes to make a killing on FTRs.
Rita Ten Grieve comes to him, calling him her ‘client’. Her job—to change his mind about climate change. She challenges him to a game. She has ten chances to explain to him why she ‘grieves for the future’ and ten chances to convince him to grieve. He plays along, hoping for ‘naughty bedtime games’. Rita gets her data from the Nimbus, some Cloud-type technology which she uses to reveal to him his father’s betrayal of the ‘denial’ cause, the first grieve. She uses virtual reality, taking him back to moments in his life on a spiritual journey like Scrooge’s Ghosts of Christmas visions. What she delivers is ‘the terror of the ordinary’.
Krimmer has regrets about having ended it with Sam, and she is being wooed by his business partner Mortenson. Sam is having regrets about how they earn their bread, and Krimmer begins to unravel, his social conscience finally pricked. This is also a story of redemption—of ’contrition, capitulation and conversion’, as each grieve further opens his eyes to his responsibility for the future of the earth.
This great techno-thriller features rich vocabulary and phrasing with beautiful, complex descriptions of scenery and weather, and the characters are lively, though I found the motivations of Krimmer’s dad confusing. The transformation of Krimmer happened a little quickly. I rather wanted him to have some major crisis or go into a dark night of the soul, before re-examining his life and livelihood.
I love techno-thrillers both for the excitement and for the education. You always learn in detail about some particular field. Here, we learn about the ins and outs of the financial exploitation of the climate change crisis. About meteorology, extreme weather tornado-chasing and the FTR market. An addendum reviews the history and science behind climate change.
This review first appeared in Reedsy Discovery.

Tony Bassett, It Never Rains (The Book Folks 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218676037-it-never-rains?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=zS1d2ryvvq&rank=4

Marilyn Willis is preparing a gourmet dinner, hoping to make a good impression on her employer, Frenchman footballer Jean-Jacques Beauvais, when three robbers break in. One ties her up and holds her at knifepoint. The footballer’s stepson Marcel is kidnapped, and his bodyguard killed. The three men steal Beauvais’ Bentley and get away.
The police conduct a search, interviewing neighbours, family members, staff, and ‘the Matchday Boys’ send a ransom demand and a video of the boy. Fortunately, other reported crimes are found to have a connection to the case, narrowing the search parameters. Clever Marcel manages to leave clues, and the badguys aren’t as clever as they think they are. The clues that unravel the case are fascinating, but the investigative methods are straightforward policework.
The policemen are very real, fully developed, as are the badguys. Detectives DS Sunita Roy and DCI Gavin Roscoe have been introduced in previous books in the series, and they are well portrayed. Roy is bit private and not too demonstrative, just the sort of personality that would suit a police detective. Her little grey cells are quietly ticking away, and her insights are often the ones that crack the case.
As is characteristic with Bassett novels, the police procedures are realistic. Different professionals, of different ethnicities and different capabilities, work on different bits of the case, just like in real life (I imagine, though I’m not a cop). We work through the case slowly, learning each clue as Roscoe and Roy do, which adds suspense, but we never lose sight of the people while the plot is gathering facts. Dialogue and interrogations are highly natural, meaning we feel right there on the scene.
Another perfect crime novel from Bassett.