To The Last Page

In some ways Long Bright River is a fairly standard police procedural in a case with the usual twists and turns, but there’s also clearly a social aspect to the novel that underpins it and gives it a little more presence, weight and meaning. Essentially though what elevates the book far above anything standard in this genre is the personal family drama that brings it vividly to life in a way and imbues it with real heart. As far as the police procedural goes Michaela ‘Mickey’ Fitzpatrick, an officer for the Philadelphia Police Department, has all the expected problems that come with working in a difficult area of town and the familiar issues with colleagues and superior officers. The rundown Kensington district is rife with drugs, prostitution and populated by a lot of unsavoury characters. And now, having just been dispatched to investigate the report of the body of a young woman found murdered and dumped, she is worried that they might have a serial killer on their hands. Mickey how...

The title of Rachel Donoghue’s debut novel suggests a mystery and there is indeed the unresolved incident of a student who disappeared from the Catholic girls school 25 years ago. There’s another kind of mystery here however in The Temple House Vanishing and that’s the mystery of feelings that it’s possible only to reflect on and understand to some extent much later and at a distance, but by then of course it’s too late to do anything to change what has happened. There are two parts then or two mysteries to be resolved in The Temple House Vanishing . In one of the sections Louisa recounts her first impressions and experience of arriving at Temple House, a Catholic girls boarding school. It’s 1990, but the rather Victorian building and wild coastal location on the edge of a cliff seems to be firmly rooted in the past. It’s not just the nuns that run the school according to strict rules, but the prefects also have an authoritarian hand in making Louisa’s life uncomfortable. It was alway...

Billed as ‘a Slough House novella’ (what happened to the ‘Jackson Lamb’ series?), The Drop doesn’t feature any of the regular Slough House crew, but it does introduce a few other bottom of the heap and dumped-upon minor operatives for the British Intelligence who are about to discover what happens when you upset Lady Di Taverner and start poking around in corners where you’ve no business being. John Bachelor’s only valuable contribution is that he has recruited an agent from the BND – Bundesnachrichtendienst – German Intelligence, although she might not be aware that she is officially an agent or may actually be a double agent. Or even a triple agent in that very left-hand not knowing the right hand way of intelligence services in these “friendly nation” times that Herron has been exploiting to tremendous effect in his Jackson Lamb novels. Bringing real world stupidity into the supposed prestige world of authorities like the national Intelligence services is however something that we...

Killing Commandatore starts in a typically Murakami way, the narrator, mid-thirties, an artist or painter at least, being asked to paint the portrait of a man with no face, just a whirl of fog. Is it real, a dream or a metaphor? With Murakami it can be all of these and something more, and more than ever Murakami seems to be retreating into a narrow field where he is writing about writing, or in the case of Killing Commendatore , writing about ideas and metaphors quite openly and literally as Ideas and Metaphors. Initially at least however, Killing Commendatore gets off to an intriguing start. The narrator has been painting portraits in Tokyo to make a living. He’s good at it, able to quickly sketch a likeness and even imbue his work with some of the personality of his sitter. When he breaks up with his wife however he goes off-grid, settling in a house on top of a remote mountain, rented out by a friend, the son of a Japanese painter of some renown, Tomohiko Amada, who is now confine...