THE DEAD WON’T SLEEP and TO TELL THE TRUTH by Anna Smith

One of my favourite books of the last year or two is Lin Anderson’s Easy Kill, the easy prey being Glasgow’s multitudinous, but totally unprotected, prostitutes. (Unprotected in comparison with those of say Amsterdam or Paris.) And so I slipped easily into The Dead Won’t Sleep with the feeling of being back on familiar territory.

There is no “who-dun-it” here. When the body of a fourteen-year-old prostitute and drug-addict named Tracy is washed up on the river shore, we already know who did it: a trio of corrupt and brutal senior police officers. The drama lies in the fight to the death – literally – between them and investigative journalist Rosie Gilmour, who is determined not to let Tracy’s death be covered up by the establishment. Or the subsequent death of another prostitute, the only witness.

But then her investigations into Tracy’s background reveal that other powerful establishment figures have access to the children at the orphange Tacy had fled, and are using them for their sickening paedophile games.

A great start to a new series. Rosie is tough – but not that tough; she too had a horrifying childhood. Let’s say courageous rather than tough. And she has two very attractive male friends: Adrian, a ruthless Bosnian hardman who would give his life for her; and TJ, a wandering minstrel – a busker with itchy feet whom she is slowly falling for in a big way.

TJ doesn’t appear in the sequel, To Tell the Truth, but Adrian does – in the nick of time, and saves Rosie’s life yet again.

This time the setting is the south of Spain, the Costa del Sol, the whole place seemingly owned and run by crime bosses from Russia, Albania and – yes, you guessed – an old enemy from Glasgow who had to leave the UK in a hurry after Rosie flashed his face on the front page of her newspaper.

A little girl, the daughter of two ‘Brits’ on holiday, has been kidnapped, just picked up and carried away while playing on the beach. Again, Rosie’s investigations spread out ever further like the ripples when a stone is dropped into a pond. Like the Moroccan rent-boy who, at the time of the kidnapping, was giving the British Home Secretary a blow-job on a balcony overlooking the beach, said Home Secretary being all-too-chummy with a Russian billionaire whose manifold business interests include trafficking girls in from eastern Europe for the straight sex trade and small children for the paedophile industry.

One of the great things about these books is that the large supporting cast are all rounded and memorable characters. I does not make me want to go rushing off to the Costa del Sol, I would have too good an idea now of what is going on all around me. I am still planning to visit Glasgow, though!

THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANT by Tarquin Hall

Tarquin Hall and The Case of the Missing Servant have been floating around on the edge of my awareness for a couple of years. Somehow, though, it never happened. Then finally, hey presto – what a lovely surprise!

But let’s begin with a typical example of the book – and the author – in action (and modern Delhi in action!) to get a feel of the book, the author and the place. Not to mention the protagonist, one Vish Puri, “India’s most private investigator”.

Here he is off to meet a contact at the Golden Greens Gold course, of which Puri was not a member although he would have liked to be [...] Not for the sake of playing (secretly he couldn’t stand the game – the ball was always ending up in those bloody ponds), but for making contacts among India’s new money, the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)-cum-MNC (Multi-National Corporation) crowd. [...] In Delhi, all big deals were now being done on the putting greens. Playing golf had become as vital a skill for an Indian detective as picking a lock. In the past few years, he had had to invest in private lessons, a set of Titleist clubs and appropriate apparel, including Argyll socks.

His chauffeur, who rejoices in the name of Handbrake, needs to ask the way.

Soon after turning off the NOIDA expressway, Handbrake spotted a Vespa moped with a Domino’s box on the back and pulled up next to it at a red light.

‘Brother, where is Galden Geens Galfing?’ he shouted in Hindi to the delivery boy over the sound of a noisy, diesel-belching Bedford truck.

His question was met with an abrupt upward motion of the hand and a questioning squint of the eyes.

‘Galden Geens Galfing, Galden Geens Galfing,’ repeated Handbrake.

The delivery boy’s puzzlement suddenly gave way to comprehension: ‘Aaah! Golden greens Galf Carse!’

‘Ji!’

‘Sectorrr forty-tooo!’

‘Brother! Where is forty-toooo sectorrr?’

‘Near Tulip High School.’

‘Where is Tulip High School?’

‘Near Om Garden!’

‘Brother, where is Om Garden?’

The delivery boy scowled and shouted in an amalgam of English and Hindi: ‘Past Eros Cinema, sectorrr ninteen! Turn right at traffic light to BPO Phase three! Enter farty-too through backside!’

I don’t usually quote so much, but I love this. Suddenly I miss India and Delhi.

Rinku, the contact Puri is to meet, is a childhood friend who had followed his father into the building business and, during the boom of the past ten years, made a fortune putting up low-cost multi-storey apartment blocks in Gurgaon and Dwarka.

Few industries are as dirty as the Delhi construction business and Rinku had broken every rule and then some. There was hardly a politician in north India he had not done a shady deal with; not a District Collector or senior police-wallah to whom he hadn’t passed a plastic bag full of cash.

At home in Punjabi Bagh where he still lived in his father’s house with his mother, wife and four children, Rinku was the devoted father and larger than life character who gave generously to the community, intervened in disputes and held the biggest Diwali party in the neighbourhood. But he also owned a secret second home, bought in his son’s name, a ten-acre ‘farmhouse’ in Mehrauli. It was here that he entertained politicians and bureaucrats with gori prostitutes.

Oh, yes. And the case, in this book?

A wealthy lawyer in Jaipur stands accused of murdering a young woman who worked as a maid in his family home. That is to say she worked for his wife (a prize bitch) and not for him. Because this lawyer has been crusading against corruption among the police and judiciary he is unpopular, to say the least, in many quarters. It transpires that there is actually no evidence whatever against him (the girl simply disappeared) but this will not save him. Only her reappearance can do that.

Vish Puri is charged with bringing the reappearance about. But how? All they know of her is her first name – Mary – and that, as the lawyer’s wife, Mrs Kasliwal, puts it, she is a “Bihari-type”.

When Puri asks her to elaborate, she tells him ‘So many servants these days are coming from Bihar and other such backward places. Naturally I assumed she was from there, also, being so dark.’

‘She was very dark, is it?’

‘Like kohl, Mr Puri,’ she said with disdain. ‘Like kohl.’

Wonderful. And after reading it you are left with a picture of modern Delhi comparable to the Victorian London conjured up by reading Sherlock Holmes.

THE SHEKINAH LEGACY by Gary Lindberg

Charlotte is a world-famous CNN news journalist. Her face is known everywhere. She is accustomed to being in dangerous situations – and likes to seem to be in control of them. Like when, at the beginning of the story, she and her cameraman, Curt, are kidnapped by a group of terrorists in Iraq – then rescued in the nick of time  (the torture was about to begin) by another group of terrorists and dropped off at their hotel. She could only wonder what was going on.

Back home in the States, she is again the target of a terrorist attack, this time with her family – her husband, Mike, and her son, Greg. Greg has Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes him unemotional and uncommunicative, but when he does take an interest in a problem his brain works faster and better than anyone else’s.

Again they are rescued. But this second attack has Charlotte so worried that she decides to disappear, taking the boy Greg with her, but not her husband. She and Mike seem to be on little more than speaking terms.

The place she chooses to disappear to is Delhi! I was grabbed! I love Delhi. And it is true, anyone could disappear in Delhi. Well, almost anyone. Not Charlotte, though, her face is too well known, she is just too much of a celebrity. And someone is there in Delhi with her, not hunting her, stalking her. But so is her mysterious protector …

I finished the book without any trouble, enjoyed it, in fact, and would recommend it to anyone. However, I did have a problem with it. At first, of course, I identified with Charlotte, but she turns out to be in many ways a very childish and stupid woman. More and more I found I was viewing the action through the eyes of her protector. And this is the first of a series. I don’t think I could bear another whole book filled with Charlotte’s egotistical nonsense. But another book featuring the real heroes of this book – her son, and of course, that mysterious protector? That I would jump at.

There is a sequel, “Sons of Zadok”, but it is labelled, as is this one, “A Charlotte Ansari Thriller”, so I don’t think I’ll risk it. But if there is anyone out there who has read it and can assure me that a large part is played in it by Charlotte’s protector (whose name, by the way, is Gideon, and he is of the Sicarii – why have I been pussy-footing around this, it’s not exactly a spoiler?) then do, please, let me now.

DEVICES AND DESIRES by P. D. James

Searching my grandmother’s bookshelves the other night for something to read, I picked a out a hefty tome (600-odd pages) by P. D. James, an Adam Dalgliesh novel with a picture of a windmill on the front that rang no bells. Nor did the blurb on the back cover, except that I remembered East Anglia was a haunt of his.  It seemed I was in luck. I am a lover of murder mysteries, medieval, modern, I don’t mind what period they are set in, just so long as they are well written, so I clutched it to my bosom and hopped onto the sofa. This would keep me busy for a couple of nights.

With P. D. James and Adam Dalgliesh, as with, for instance, Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot, you know more or less exactly what you are going to get, and you know it will be faultlessly crafted and beautifully written.

The great difference between Agatha Christie and P. D. James, or so it seems to me, is that whereas Agatha Christie merely introduces us to the population of the village or ship or train or whatever (This is Dr Jenkins, he’s new to the village, young wife, baby; this is Daisy Williams, she’s Miss Myers’ maid – Miss Myers? The elderly lady who lives in that big house – alone now, her sister died four months ago), P. D. James provides us with the sort of detail we have grown accustomed to and perhaps even come to crave from watching soap-operas. By the time we finish a P. D. James book such as this one, we know the characters (in this case those living on the Headland) better than we know our neighbours, better even than all but the very closest members of our family. Dalgleish can return to London, we don’t need him. The drama is over, but we want the play to go on.

Dalgliesh’s elderly aunt has died, leaving him a fortune. He could now give up police work and concentrate on his poetry if he so wished – if. She has also left him a small house and a large windmill on the Headland, a remote – well, headland, yes – on the north coast of Norfolk, not far from Cromer, once famous for its natural beauty but now famous for Larksoken Nuclear Power Station. Infamous, in the opinion of many, including several of the characters in the book.

It is not the power station that concerns us here, at least at the outset, it is the presence on the Headland of a serial killer knows as the Whistler.

Not Dalgliesh’s concern, of course. It is not his patch and he is not on duty. The task of identifying the Whistler before any more women are killed falls to Chief Inspector Terry Rickards, who is naturally wary of Dalgliesh (Dalgliesh upset him once in London years ago) but turns out to be a very intelligent and sympathetic man.

And Dalgliesh does get mixed up in the investigation, of course. He gets to know everyone and we see them through his eyes, but we get to know them better, because the point of view shifts and shifts and shifts again and we know what most of the characters are privately thinking and feeling most of the time.

Which is why, perhaps, we identify not just with the protagonist but with almost everyone in turn. And we don’t, as I say, want to be “cast out” of their lives (perhaps I should say of them) at the end of the book.

Anything else? Yes, two things.

First, an unforgettable moment when one of the characters, Meg, experiences some sort of time-slip. It starts with what seems to be a straightforward “timeless moment” as described by so many mystics and poets, but then she becomes aware of “the sound of horses’ hoofs and tramping feet, of rough male voices, of an incoherent babble as if the tide were sucking back the shingle on all the beaches of the world. And then there was a hiss and crackling of faggots, an explosion of fire, and then a second of dreadful silence broken by the high, long-drawn-out scream of a woman.” When this happens, she is in the house known as Martyr’s Cottage. On the wall outside the cottage is a plaque reading:

In a cottage on this site lived Agnes Poley, Protestant martyr, burned at Ipswich, 15th August, 1557, aged 32 years.

Unexpected, I don’t know why, in a P. D. James novel.

The other is about poetry. Two of the characters are discussing Adam Dalgliesh. She is telling her brother that she has invited Adam to dinner.

‘Am I expected to talk about his poetry?’

‘I imagine he’s come to Larksoken to get away from people who want to talk about his poetry. But it wouldn’t hurt you to take a look at it. I’ve got the most recent volume. And it is poetry, not prose rearranged on the page.’

‘With modern verse, can one tell the difference?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘If it can be read as prose, then it is prose. It’s an infallible test.’

Very true. They should certainly have this rule up on the wall in the English faculties at all universities. and in the Creative Writing Departments.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as poetic prose, prose poetry, and P. D. James very frequently writes it. There are scores of examples in this one book. I won’t start quoting again, but take a second look at that description of the time-slip …

DYING TO TELL by Robert Goddard

This is the first Robert Goddard book I have read. I was both surprised and I was impressed. I was expecting the usual divorced and hard-drinking tough guy at home on the mean streets of New York or Los Angeles, London, Glasgow or Paris, Amsterdam or Marseilles – or the cosmopolitan version at home everywhere, be it any of the above or Cairo or Rio, Casablana, Madras or Hong-Kong.

But no. I got an unmarried, unemployed resident of Glastonbury who was perfectly content with his life just the way it was. The only thing he had in common with the aforementioned tough guys was that he enjoyed a drink or three. And when the going got tough (and the tough guys got going) he enjoyed a drink even more – preferably with his mates in the local after signing on for the dole.

But, as you will have guessed, our hero (for he is certainly not an anti-hero) gets going to, when needs must. Under protest, of course.

At one point he describes himself (to a woman who has become involved through no fault of her own) as a natural quitter. Later, when she tells him it’s time to quit, it’s getting much too dangerous, he surprises himself – and us! – by saying “The time to quit has come and gone.”

I won’t tell you about the plot. Surely it is enough to know that here you have a local lad without a penny in his pocket taking on highly organised crime (think Great Train Robbery and John F. Kennedy Assassination) in places as far apart as Berlin, Tokyo, San Francisco and – yes – Somerset, and winning!

 

RAVEN BLACK by Ann Cleves

Winter on Shetland. Everything blanketed in snow. It is customary, apparently, on New Year’s Eve, to call on one’s neighbours, have a drink with them, wish them well.

No one has ever called on Magnus Tait, at least not since his old mother died. Not on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, or on any other day of the year. Not since a little girl called Catriona disappeared right after visiting him and his mother, making him the obvious suspect. After all, he was simple and strange and just the kind of person who would kill little girls. But her body was never found and there was no evidence that she had even been killed, let alone that he killed her, so he was released after some rather brutal questioning by police who “knew” (as did everyone else on the island) that he had murdered the child. His mother died, and he lived alone, year after year.

On this New Year’s Eve, as always, he had the whisky and the cake ready just as his mother had taught him. And suddenly, as he was about to give up and go to bed, he heard voices. Girls’ voices. Two girls of sixteen, seventeen, knocked at the door. They had been drinking, were on their way home, had been dropped off at the end of the lane to walk the rest of the way, and saw his light on.

One was Catherine Ross, an English girl who had only recently come to live in the area with her widowed and inconsolable father, a teacher at the local secondary school. The other was Sally, her friend, the daughter of the headmistress of the primary school. Perhaps they didn’t have much in common but were driven together by the loneliness that teachers’ children always experience.

It was Catherine, of course, who knew nothing of Magnus Tait’s sinister reputation, who wanted to drop in on him. Though perhaps she would have anyway, even if she had known. She was that kind of girl. Beautiful, confident, and – as it turned out – making a film about the people of the island as a 6th Form English project, a brutally truthful film, in which she would certainly have wanted Magnus to appear.

They leave after a drink and some cake and go home. No problem.

But the next day, Catherine’s body is found in the snow not far from Magnus’s house.

What chance has he? The only person who even considers the remote possibility that it might not have been Magnus who killed Catherine is the local Inspector Perez (proud descendant of a ship-wrecked Spanish sailor at the time of the Armada!) but then a team of detectives is despatched from Inverness and it  is taken out of his hands.

Gradually, we learn more about various people who live on the island and realise that Magnus is far from being the only weird one. However – no, I mustn’t tell you any more, it will spoil it for you.

I loved it. Loved the story and the people, and especially the fascinating setting. I must go to Shetland one day. Perhaps even in the winter for New Year and “Up Helly Aa”!

Mark Billingham’s TOM THORN

Tom Thorn is fast becoming my favourite uniformed sleuth. Make that plain-clothes sleuth. What I mean to say is that he’s police. Police at what I suppose must be their very best. And therefore immensely unpopular in certain circles both inside and outside the Force.

The first one I read was Lifeless. For personal and private reasons, Thorn has been taken off a case involving the killing of homeless men, men sleeping rough on the streets of London’s West End, with no protection, no door to lock. So far there have been three of them, each kicked to death where he lay and left with a £20 note pinned to his forehead. Then one day, walking through the city with nothing to occupy him, he begins to identify with the victims of the case he has been taken off.

And suddenly realises he could easily end up on the streets himself. And that gives him an idea: why doesn’t he go undercover among the rough sleepers, most of whom would rather die than give information to someone they know is a policeman.

This is a fascinating book because it is not simply an almost perfect detective story / crime novel, it is also an in-depth look at the world of London’s homeless, the young drug-addicts (two wonderful characters stand out – after reading this your view of them will never be the same again!), the alcoholics (Thorne has no trouble passing himself off as one of these!), the weirdos and crazies (like Radio Bob, who believes he is a natural radio receiver), and those who simply want no part at all of the system.

The next I read was In the Dark, where the investigator turned out to be not Thorne himself but Helen Weeks, a pregnant Detective Sergeant working with a child protection unit, whose husband – only they are not actually married – is killed in what seems to have been a routine hit-and-run traffic accident.

Helen is one of those who believe he was murdered.

But as she investigates – heavily pregnant and more or less on her own – she begins to uncover aspects of her man’s life that she knew nothing about. Was he “bent”, and working for the London mafia? Was it they who had for their own purposes eliminated him? Or had he perhaps been working undercover, even been perhaps a kind of double agent? She is driven on partly by her own sense of guilt, for not only was she not married to him but the baby she is now carrying may well not have been his either.

I love that “may well not have been”. This was another heroine I wholly indentified with. When the story came to an end with the birth of the baby in intensely dramatic circumstances, I thought, sadly, that I had seen the last of her. Not so. Billingham must have been very taken with her too, for he brought her back for another shot in Good As Dead. But before that we have From the Dead, in which Thorn comes up against his own personal Moriarty, a London criminal/businessman whose wife was convicted of organising his murder a decade previously, but who, it seems, is very much alive and well and living in Spain on the Costa del Crime.

The wife, Donna, newly released from prison, receives some photos of him sent to her anonymously. Stunned, and desperate to find out what is happening, but with a natural dislike and distrust of the police, she hires a young would-be private eye called Anna Carpenter whose only experience is in divorce cases where she was the bait in the honey-trap. Soon finding herself out of her depth, Anna turns to Tom Thorn, the Detective Inspector who had investigated the original murder. If the charred body in that car ten years ago had not been Donna’s husband, then whose had it been?

Thorn’s attempt to keep his relationship with the gorgeous twenty-three-year-old Anna on a strictly professional – i.e paternal and patronising – footing is valiant, but there is no way he can keep it up in the face of her guileless admiration and eagerness to please … I loved her, and knew Billingham had got it exactly right. In her position – a position I could very easily imagine myself in! – I would have been exactly the same with Tom Thorn.

Then in Good As Dead Helen Weeks reappears, this time as the victim in a hostage situation where an elderly Pakistani tobacconist named Javed Akhtar, in desperation, successfully forces Tom Thorn to reopen the invesigation into the death of his son, Amin Akhtar, insisting that Amin had not committed suicide but had been murdered. Thorn has three days to prove it was murder and produce the murderer, while Helen is held at gun-point in the back of the tobacconist’s, waiting to be shot. He succeeds, but by going about it in an even more unorthodox manner than usual and not without stepping on a great many toes … A great crime story of vice and corruption in the highest circles and little people getting trodden underfoot as the mighty ones attempt to cover their arses.

Read these books. Read them all. There are still a couple at the beginning of the series I have not read, but I want to know now how the whole soap opera started so I am going to find them and add them to my collection. I wonder if they’re available on Kindle …

Of course, if they are, they might be more expensive than the paperback. Publishers of popular mainstream fiction don’t seem to have understood yet that ebooks should be cheaper – substantially cheaper – because the publishers of ebooks don’t have any production costs at all.

THE ROSE OF HARLOW by M.B.Gilbride

You need a brain to read The Rose of Harlow – don’t get it if you’re just looking for another shot of soft porn – but if you’ve got a brain and a sense of humour, then give it a shot. It is a weird masterpiece.

Apparently M.B. Gilbride first wrote it as a play, then one day found it in a drawer, read it and decided to rewrite it.

The rewrite has produced, instead of a play, a very original dramatic novella.

The story is subtitled The Misadventures of an English Rose in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.

The reader identifies completely with Gerda, the English Rose, (anyway this reader does) as she is carried helplessly from a Teacher Training College (she is expelled) to a Realignment Office (where she is glamorised) to a Ministry (she is fired after offending the Prime Minister) to the Inner City (and hanging about, unemployed) to the Forest (and living out) to Glastonbury (and a group of feminist New-Agers) to Prison, to a Research Lab (where we see her as a mermaid – yes!) to a Doggy Club (like a nasty Bunny Club) to a cheap brothel (Upstairs at the Bunny Club), from where she – she … read it and see.

But I must mention some of the characters! Her friend Penny (the political activist), Professor Mandril (the baboon on a white charger, her first and only verray parfait gentil knyght), Father Figure (who regrets the passing of the Inquisition), Billy (the ageing SF writer for whom she models), Homo mensuralis and Homo sensibilis (both of whom wish to change her), Woolly-hat, Bowler, Skinhead (who takes her to the Harlow Rose Show on his bike, and absconds with the prize-money when she wins), Estelle de Miel, Dicky (the bird-watcher who spots her in the Forest), the Bag-lady, the Faw-Paw-String-Man, the Curate (the world is a curate’s egg), and many others.

Gilbride’s slant-eyed view of the eighties and his unique way of seeing all things through the eye of the mermaid – literary impressionism – what more can you ask? As I say, weird, but totally unforgettable.

THE SECRET OF SHAMBHALA by James Redfield

I read The Celestine Prophecy and The Tenth Insight years ago, when I was a student, but somehow missed this one. Really missed it. I mean it was published back in 1999 and I had never even heard of it. Then one day recently there it was right in front of me, on the bookshelf of a charity shop. What James Redfield would call a meaningful coincidence, because I had been discussing the concept of Shambhala (or Shangri-La) with a friend only the previous evening. (We had both of us read Silk-Roads and Shadows by Susan Schwartz – I must do a post on that wonderful book sometime! – and both of us been to India; but neither of us to Tibet, for obvious reasons.)

The Secret of Shambhala is subtitled “In Search of the Eleventh Insight” but it is in fact more an account of putting the Tenth Insight into practice. The author’s neighbour’s fourteen-year-old daughter informs him out of the blue that they “are not living the Insights“. Taken aback – he was unaware that she had read his books – he tells her it is not easy, it takes time. “But there are people living them now,” she responds. “In central Asia. The Kunlun Mountains.” And she tells him “You have to go there. It’s important. There’s something changing. You have to go there now. You have to see it.”

Naturally, one thing leads to another and off he goes to Tibet, where he learns that the people living the Insights are doing so in Shambhala. But what and where is Shambhala?

The Chinese who occupy that raped and martyred land have criss-crossed it with roads and military installations, have explored every inch of it in their helicopters. Surely there cannot be a great fertile valley somewhere among the snowy peaks that they have missed? But yes, there is, he is informed. Only it is hidden.

This is Redfield’s usual mixture of adventure and mysticism. The adventure lies in being hunted across Tibet by the Chinese and is sometimes pure James Bond, but with an ongoing moral dilemma as to how they ought to respond to Chinese terror-tactics and ethnic cleansing: yes, I mean ethnic cleansing.  “The Chinese are doing the same thing Stalin did in Manchuria,” the author’s friend Yin tells him, “importing thousands of outsiders, in this case ethnic Chinese, into Tibet to change the cultural balance and institute Chinese ways. They demand that our schools teach only the Chinese language.” And he – Yin – adds later, “Ironic, isn’t it? The culture of Tibet is totally dedicated to the spiritual life. We are arguably the most religious anywhere. And we have been attacked by the most atheistic government on Earth – that of China. It is a perfect contrast for all the world to see.”

And the mysticism? That lies in the four extensions of the prayer field, of prayer-energy, that the author must master before he can hope to gain access to Shambhala.

THE FOREST OF SOULS by Carla Banks

Helen Kovacs and Faith Lange are old school and university friends who, after graduating from Oxford, went their separate ways. Helen, despite her First, married and settled into life as a mother and housewife, while Faith pursued the academic career that has led to her being appointed Senior Research Assistant at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Manchester.

Briefly, their lives come together again when Helen tires of being a housewife, completes her PhD, and is accepted at Manchester for post-doctoral research. And leaves her husband.

Then Helen is murdered.

From the beginning, Faith  is sure that this was not some random, possibly sex-related, killing, and she gradually becomes obsessed with the notion that the killer was in fact Helen’s jealous and violent husband, Daniel.

Jake Denbigh, however, while agreeing that it was not some random killing, has a different theory. He believes Helen was murdered because someone did not want her to pursue her research into the atrocities committed in and outside the city of Minsk during WW2. Denbigh,  a writer and journalist who has himself been carrying out research in the same field,  is very interested in Faith’s own grandfather, who arrived in the UK as a refugee in 1943 and whose home, though he has always been very secretive about it, was in Minsk.

An exciting read and a mind-numbing reconstruction of the war years in Poland and Belarus. Eastern Poland and Belarus were occupied first by the Russians (when Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them), then by the Germans after Hitler (greedy for more of Eastern Europe and after having lost the Battle of Britain and the Battle of El Alamein) declared war on Russia. The Nazis were seen by many at that time, in Belarus anyway, as liberators. But not for long, once the atrocities began.

It is those atrocities – the massacre and the mass graves under the trees in the Kurapaty Forest; and the Maly Trostenets death camp – and the further atrocities committed by the Communists when the Nazis were pushed back out of Minsk and the rest of Belarus and the Russians rolled back in, that forms the heart of this unforgettable book.