A portrait of the autist as an older man - Eyejaybee tries for 100 books again

Hello, everyone.

I am James, a 61-year-old widower and civil servant, theoretically based in Whitehall (although still predominantly working from home).

I am glad to be back for another year's reading challenge, and I am very grateful to Pamelad for setting up this year’s Challenge Group. I am also looking forward to seeing how everyone fares, and to picking up loads of book bullets as we progress through the year.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024, with a feast of great reading.

Here are my counters for the Challenge:

Books read tracker:



Pages read tracker:

As in previous years, before plunging into this year’s challenge, I thought it might be worth looking back over my reading during 2023.

I read 129 books, just easing past my personal target of 120. While most aspects of my life have returned to their pre-pandemic norms, I still feel that my reading patterns are slightly affected by the impact of Covid. Like most of Whitehall, my department has been keen to have a greater proportion of staff working in the office, and I have generally been going in for about two days each week. This has provided useful reading time of about an hour each way twice a week, although I still feel i am missing out on the pre-pandemic feast of reading time that my commuting previously offered.

Looking back over the list of books that I read, I notice that once again I read far fewer non-fiction books than had been usual for me a few years ago. However, the book that I found most impressive throughout the year was non-fiction: Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell's wonderful biography of John Donne.

The fiction books that I enjoyed the most during the year (in chronological order of my reading, rather than in my estimation of their merits) were:

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
White Riot by Joe Thomas
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang
Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming

Of those, I think that The Perfect Golden Circle was probably the one I liked most, although I greatly enjoyed Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, too.

I think that the book I enjoyed least during the year was Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.

Cumulative list of books read during 2024.

001. Swag by Elmore Leonard.
002. The Coldest Case by Martin Walker.
003. The Crash by Robert Peston.
004. The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths.
005. Point of Origin by Patricia Cornwell.
006. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.
007. The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie.
008. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
009. Waterland by Graham Swift.
010. Dead Giveaway by Simon Brett.
011. The Last Word by Elly Griffiths.
012. A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin.
013. Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs.
014. The Final Round by Bernard O’Keeffe.
015. Simply Lies by David Baldacci.
016. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard.
017. The Tour by Simon Wilde.
018. Private Lessons by Bernard O’Keeffe.
019. The Camel Club by David Baldacci.
020. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke.
021. Lost and Never Found by Simon Mason.
022. The Tooth Tattoo by Peter Lovesey.
023. Every Trick in the Book by Bernard O’Keeffe.
024. Anna O by Matthew Blake.
025. To Kill a Troubadour by Martin Walker.
026. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett.
027. Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974-1979 by Dominic Sandbrook.*
028. Absolute Power by David Baldacci
029. The Stone Wife by Peter Lovesey.
030. Twelve Secrets by Robert Gold.
031. What Bloody Man is That? by Simon Brett.
032. The Collectors. By David Baldacci.
033. Death on the Thames by Alan Johnson.
034. A Chateau Under Siege by Martin Walker.
035. The Drift by C. J. Tudor.
036. Stone Cold by David Baldacci
037. The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
038. Eleven Liars by Robert Gold.
039. Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer.
040. Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan.
041. Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz.
042. Divine Justice by David Baldacci.
043. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin.
044. Hell’s Corner by David Baldacci.
045. The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett.
046. Who Dares Wins by Dominic Sandbrook.*
047. A Study in Death by Iain McDowall.
048. Ten Seconds by Robert Gold.
049. A Decent Interval by Simon Brett.
050. Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin.
051. Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan.
052. Double Jeopardy by Colin Forbes.
053. Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie.
054. Memory Man by David Baldacci.
055. Stagestruck by Peter Lovesey.
056. In A House of Lies by Ian Rankin.
057. A Deadly Habit by Simon Brett.
058. The Last Mile by David Baldacci.
059. A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh.
060. The Cleaner by Mark Dawson.
061. The Cinderella Killer by Simon Brett.
062. No Way Out by Tim Shipman.*
063. Cleavage by Cleo Watson.
064. Murder at the Monastery by The Reverend Richard Coles.
065. The Fix by David Baldacci.
066. The Mirror and the Road by William Boyd.*
067. The Man in Black and Other Stories by Elly Griffiths.
068. A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin.
069. The Fallen by David Baldacci.
070. The Wrong Hands by Mark Billingham.
071. Redemption by David Baldacci.
072. On Hampstead Heath by Marika Cobbold.
073. A Grave in the Woods by Martin Walker.
074. Split Second by David Baldacci.
075. A Reconstructed Corpse by Simon Brett.
076. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.
077. The Three Graces by Amanda Craig.
078. The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
079. A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell.
080. Walk the Wire by David Baldacci.
081. Jeeves in the Offing by P. G. Wodehouse.
082. White Riot by Joe Thomas.
083. Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P. G. Wodehouse.
084. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell.
085. Hour Game by David Baldacci.
086. Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse.
087. Red Menace by Joe Thomas.
088. Blue Genes by Val McDermid.
089. The Innocent by David Baldacci.
090. Paddington Abroad by Michael Bond.
091. Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.
092. Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart.
093. Simple Genius by David Baldacci.
094. Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent.
095. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas.
096. The Examiner by Janice Hallett.
097. Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.
098. The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin.
099. Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
100. Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook.*
101. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman.
102. Hunted by Abir Mukherjee.
103. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. (406)
104. Capital by John Lanchester. (524)
105. Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. (448)
106. At Lady Molly’s by Anthony Powell. (272)
107. Die of Shame by Mark Billingham. (481)
108. The Wizard of the Kremlin by Guiliano da Empoli. (285)
109. A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks. (393)
110. The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie. (368)
111. A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin. (331)
112. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell. (272)
113. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. (486)
114. Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin. (331)
115. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell (252)
116. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain. (181)
117. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse. (194)
118. The Waiting by Michael Connelly (405)
119. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. (305)
120. Dead Souls by Ian Rankin. (407)
121. The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe. (338)
122. Against the Grain by Peter Lovesey. (362)
123. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (136)
124. Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (273)
125. The Enigma Girl by Henry Porter. (486)
126. A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont. (363)
127. The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe (402)
128. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell. (268)
129. Out by Tim Shipman* (940)
130. White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook* (972)
131. The Deaths by Mark Lawson. (416)
132. The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith. (550)
133.

Looking forward to another year of your detailed, thoughtful reviews, James.

#4 Me too!

1. Swag by Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard established a reputation as a writer of so-called ‘hard-bitten’ crime novels (although I believe that earlier in his career he specialised in Westerns), and this is one of his better-known works. It introduces the character of Ernest Stickley Jr, generally known as ‘Stick’, who would appear in some of Leonard’s later works.

Swag was published in 1976 and would probably now be prefaced with warnings that it contains expressions and views that reflected that time. It is also heavily sprinkled with references to clothing atrocities that might trigger alarm among sensitive fashion-conscious current readers (and sparked the odd moment of embarrassment in me when I realised I had also been guilty of such crimes against common decency myself).

The plot concerns two minor criminals, ‘Stick’ and Frank Ryan (which allows for occasional puns about frank and earnest discussions) who come together in rather unusual circumstances, and agree to form a partnership to commit a series of armed robberies around Detroit. The story is very much plot driven, although while Leonard doesn’t enter into lengthy descriptions of the protagonists’ characters, it becomes clear that Stick and Frank have different approaches to their work, and also different ultimate objectives.

Leonard keeps up the fast pace, and he held my attention closely throughout. I felt that the book ended rather suddenly, but found reading it an enjoyable experience.

***1/2

I think crimes against fashion decency are a fundamental part of the human experience and good for the psyche. Things seem so standardized now I don't think my nieces and nephews will ever have that and it makes me a little sad.

The part of me that wants to read widely always thinks I should read something by Leonard just because he's one of those Big authors, but I might go with one of the more recent ones he's known for just to give myself the best chance of enjoying it (more due to that sudden ending and just author growth than to dated aspects in the language etc).

Hah. My youngest wears socks and sandals. This is anathema to my generation, and I think they're doing it because they know it pushes my buttons. :D

They also rock a very filthy mullet.

Regarding your 2023 reads, Yellowface was my favourite book of 2023, and honorable mentions to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

>7 mabith: >8 wookiebender: I have certainly been guilty of more than my fair share of fashion outrages, and no doubt my colleagues would suggest that I still am.

2. The Coldest case by Martin Walker.

Affable Chief of Police Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges returns in another charming Dordogne mystery, awash with local colour and yet more sumptuous meals.

This time, he finds himself engaged in an old case, hunting for the murderer of an unknown man whose body had been found thirty years ago near a local campsite. His colleague and friend, now head of the local Gendarmerie and starting to think about retirement, had worked on the case at the time – it was his first involvement in a murder investigation, and has been obsessed about the identity of the unknown victim throughout most of his career. While studying an anthropological display at a nearby museum, Bruno has an inspiration about a possible new approach.

Meanwhile, two members of Bruno’s circle of friends are (separately) following up rumours about the possibility that there might be agents from the former East Germany still under deep cover throughout France, and possibly now in positions of seniority within the administration.

As always, the plot is almost secondary to the marvellous descriptions of life, and particularly the food and wine, enjoyed in the Dordogne. That is not, however, to say that the story isn’t robust, and once again Martin Walker pulls off an entertaining and engaging story.

****

3. The Crash by Robert Peston.

One of my all-time favourite novels is A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks. Published in 2009 while the dust was still settling following the global banking crisis, it features an extraordinarily Machiavellian financier called John Veals, who devises and sets in motion a major couple which, in addition to winning him an immense fortune, will scupper the country’s foremost banking institution. Reading it shortly after its publication, while the wounds that virtually everyone in the Western world sustained from the banking crisis still felt rather raw, I was amazed at the apparent simplicity of Veals’s subversion.

As it happens, it was during that crisis that I first became aware of Robert Peston, who was then the BBC’s leading financial correspondent, and whose sanguine reporting helped offer some degree of understanding of terms being bandied around such as ‘subprime’ and ‘toxic debt’. Peston moved on to become the BBC’s leading political editor, before then moving to perform a similar role in commercial television.

His second novel revisits the crisis. The story is a first-person narration from Gil Peck, a high-profile journalist with the BBC, and opens in 2007 when he receives a tip that one of Britain’s banks, based in the north-east of England, may have seriously overreached itself and could be facing existential challenges. Peck checks with contacts in the Bank of England who confirm that there are issues with the bank in question. Peck uses the tip to secure a journalistic scoop, although that results in massive queues outside each branch of the ailing bank as customers rush to withdraw their money. But then Peck’s contact in the Bank of England is found dead, and it transpires that various other banks are experiencing similar problems, and may be looking for the government to bail them out.

Peston draws on his immense knowledge of the field to create a very tense thriller, full of twists. He also has an enviable capacity to describe highly complex financial transactions and constructions in a readily accessible manner. In a former incarnation I was an investigative tax inspector, but my experiences of forensic accounting would not have helped me to make much headway through the labyrinthine twists and deceptions that mar Gil Peck’s investigations.

My one cavil – a minor one – is that nearly all of the characters are so deeply unpleasant, including Peck himself. I don’t particularly need to be able to empathise with characters in order to enjoy a book, but it would be nice to find at least one that has some redeeming traits.

****

>8 wookiebender: One aspect that particularly struck me about Yellowface was how different it was from her previous novel, Babel, which was my favourite book from 2022.

>12 Eyejaybee: Babel was a great read, too. I should try some of her other books as well.

4. The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths.

I had originally picked this novel up more or less by chance and really enjoyed it. Since then I have (I think) read all of Elly Griffiths’ books (and as she is very prolific, generally publishing two novels a year, that is quite a lot of reading). I decided it to re-read it because her latest novel comes out very soon, and it features some of the characters from this one.

The book strays into similar territory to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, (which I had read just a few weeks before my first reading of this), sharing its evocation of the traditional, ‘cosy whodunit mystery of the past.

Peggy Smith was in her nineties, so perhaps it was no surprise that she should be found dead in her favourite seat in her apartment situated within a sheltered housing scheme in Shoreham. Peggy was, however, an unusual woman, and had been cited in the acknowledgements section of dozens of crime novels written by a wide selection of authors. It seemed that a lot of writers of crime fiction had come to view her almost as a consultant, and she was famed within those circles for her ability to suggest new ways in which characters might meet their end, or how their former associations with criminal life might catch up with them.

Not everyone is convinced by the apparent normality of Peggy’s death, though. Her Ukrainian-born carer, Natalka, thinks that she had seen someone watching Peggy’s apartment in the days leading up to the death. But then, as we will discover, Natalka herself is far from normal. Indeed, she proves to be one of the most entertaining characters I have encountered for a long time.

Elly Griffiths brings off a literary coup with this book as, while constituting a paean to the traditional detective novel, she peoples it with a host of unusual characters, who challenge the very idea of whodunit clichés. Natalka is aided in her investigations by a former monk who, having resiled from his vocation now manages a shack selling coffee on the beach, and a lesbian Sikh detective who dreams that some day she might manage to escape from living with her parents above their corner shop, although she dreads revealing to them with her hidden life.

The plot builds slowly at first, with Natalka and Co struggling initially to convince the police that their suspicions have any basis at all. The pace picks up, however, and takes in a visit to a crime fiction festival in Aberdeen (which itself offers a stark contrast to its fellow seaside town of Shoreham).

Deftly plotted, and full of engaging, yet also plausible, characters, this is a hugely enjoyable book, and perhaps my favourite so far by Elly Griffiths.

*****

5. Point of Origin by Patricia Cornwell.

Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia returns for her ninth outing, As the novel opens, she receives a letter from Carrie Grethen, a psychopathic killer who has appeared in several previous books, and who has appointed herself arch nemesis for Kay, her niece Lucy, and crime fighting associates Benton Wesley (formerly the suave, head profiler for the FBI and now established as Kay’s Lover) and ultra rough diamond Police Captain, Pete Marino. Grethen is in custody, undergoing psychiatric assessment while awaiting trial for multiple killings. The letter is far from lucid, but within its frantic scrawl Kay perceives an urgent if undefined threat.

Meanwhile, Kay and Marino are summoned to the site of a gruesome arson attack which has levelled the capacious house and stables of a prominent and immensely wealthy businessman, with whom they have crossed swords before. In addition to the string of horses housed at the property, a human body is found, prompting a federal, cross-agency investigation. The owner of the property is an African American, and racial motives for the attack are suspected.

This novel was slightly less frenetic that some of its predecessors had been, although Kay Scarpetta remains on the cusp pf paranoia. Her niece Lucy is slightly less objectionable that in some of the recent books, too, which certainly came as a relief.

The plot is soundly developed, and while by this stage of her writing career Cornwell seemed happy to leave no cliché knowingly overlooked, the story moves along briskly. It still seemed a long way from the string of excellent books that launched the series, such as Post Mortem, All That Remains, and Body of Evidence.

6. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes.

I struggled with this book which taxed my limited reservoir of patience and credulity beyond comfortable limits

>16 Eyejaybee: Nice, crisp review - sometimes one feels a book deserves no more, indeed.

>16 Eyejaybee: I agree!!

7. The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie.

I was introduced to the works of Agatha Christie when I was about eleven or twelve, and started reading them one after another with that particular teenage boy’s avidity that can rapidly morph into mindless obsession. Looking back now, I am not sure whether I even especially enjoyed them at the time – I just turned to the next one as a manifestation of the compulsion to try to ‘complete the set’. I was much the same with the Sherlock Holmes stories, and remember reading the four novels and five volumes of short stories in one block during one school summer holiday.

Looking at Agatha Christie’s books now, I see that in my youth I completely failed to acknowledge any of the occasional wry social comment, or the frequent bitchiness. Indeed, having revisited some of the less well known works in the cannon, I see a brutal side to Ms Christie’s nature, with victims often described in the most starkly negative terms.

The Sittaford Mystery is one of Dame Agatha’s earlier novels, and a standalone story, not featuring any of her famous sleuths. It tells of the murder of Captain Trevelyan RN, a retired naval man who lived alone in Dartmoor, eschewing all company apart from that of his old friend Major Burnaby. Trevelyan is known as a rather solitary and unsociable character with a tendency towards parsimony. Receiving a surprisingly high offer of rent for his large house in Sittaford over the winter period, he has decamped, moving to the nearby town of Exhampton. Burnaby and Trevelyan have fallen in the habit of spending sociable evenings together twice a week, walking the three miles each way.

As the novel opens, heavy snow has all but blocked Sittaford off, to such an extent that Major Burnaby initially decides to miss his customary evening with Captain Trevelyan. Instead, he joins other guests at Trevelyan’s old home, where the new tenants are proving very hospitable to all their neighbours. As a diversion in the wintry evening, the house party decided to have a try at ‘table turning’ conducting an amateur séance. This exercise yields up an alarming message …

The novel is as engaging as Christie’s books generally are, although this is one that has not aged well, I suspect that it may well have been on the cusp of being rather dated even when it was first published. Christie was still honing her act, and had not yet learned to smooth all the potential wrinkles out of her plot, Captain Trevelyan is a surly character, and his taciturn misogyny seems too clumsy to be credible.

However, I enjoyed the glee with which Emily Trefusis and Charles Enderby, the self-appointed nemeses, pursue their investigation, although I felt that the crime when finally revealed lacked any real viability. If this had been the first Agatha Christie book that I had read, I am pretty certain that I would not have bothered with any others.

8. The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.

This novel stirred a range of emotions, and also offered an insight into an area and period of history of which I am lamentably ignorant. The story is principally set in Penang in 1921, although it includes flashbacks to a few years earlier, and is mainly narrated by Lesley Hamlyn. She had been born in Penang and had married Robert who had established a thriving legal practice in the colony. In 1921, the Hamlyns paly host to celebrated English author, William Somerset Maugham, at that point nearing the zenith of his fame, having recently had four of his plays staged concurrently in London’s West End, a feat never previously achieved by any writer. Somerset Maugham is not travelling alone. He is accompanied by Gerald Haxton, ostensibly his secretary, but actually his clandestine lover. Lesley’s memories are interspersed with third person narratives following Maugham’s thoughts and deed in the colony.

Lesley’s recollections of 1910 bring a different focus as she recalls her encounters with the revolutionary Sun Yat Sen and his supporters, who were then touring Penang with a view to tapping rich Chinese ex-pats for funds to support their insurrection against the Chinese Emperor. If I felt somewhat ignorant of Somerset Maugham, I was hopelessly at a loss over Sun Yat Sen, and was intrigued to learn more about him.

I found this book both engaging and enlightening, although I did feel slightly disappointed that the writer didn’t convey more of the atmosphere of 1920s Penang. As a backdrop to the action of the book, it might almost have been everywhere. From my limited experience of Somerset Maugham’s writing (principally through the few short stories that I have encountered), he was able to evoke a strong feeling of his settings. Indeed, although very little of the story occurs in South Africa, the environment there is conveyed far more clearly than that of Penang.

Still, that is a minor cavil, and I found the book very enjoyable.

Do you have any good science fiction book recommendations for a 2nd year highschooler

9. Waterland by Graham Swift.

I first read this novel shortly after the paperback edition was released, almost forty years ago. It had been included in the previous year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and most of the reviews had been appropriately enthusiastic. I had just started in my first proper job, and was revelling in the awareness that, after years of student penury, I could now occasionally take a chance on buying a book on a whim, rather than having to weigh up every purchase against the risk of Micawberesque misery.

And what a book! In just over three hundred pages, Graham Swift offers the reader a history of East Anglia, including insights into political strife, land reclamation, flood management, the finer points of brewing, the beguiling mysteries of the eel, the culmination of the Cold War in the early 1980s, a love story, a murder, and a cautionary tale about incest, all wrapped up in a fascinating exegesis of the nature of history itself.

Tom Crick is, for the moment, Head of History at a large comprehensive school in London, beset with domestic challenges and facing strenuous effort by his headteacher to close his department. His Sixth Form lessons have, however, bucked the trend in which disaffected pupils move away from the humanities. His lessons are swell, because word has spread among the pupils of a new approach to teaching in which Crick’s lessons are suffused with vivid recollections from his own childhood. Crick’s pupils are dejected, convinced that the world is on the brink of a final nuclear war. Forty years earlier, Crick had been growing up in Norfolk during the Second World War, where his father was a lock-keeper responsible for vital flood management in that low lying land, contending with rationing and watching regular bombing missions taking off from the air force bases spread all around the county.

Swift takes his readers through numerous flashbacks, showing how Crick’s family had come to live by the river, and painting the history of the region. The flat landscape, and numerous waterways of the region play a key part in setting the atmosphere of the story. Swift’s prose is as clear as the water in Crick’s father’s lock, and his mastery of the multiple strands of the story is immense. He merges folklore with history, and manage the cast of characters deftly.

I can’t remember which book actually won the Booker Prize when this was a challenger – it must have been jolly good to have beaten this.

>20 Eyejaybee: that makes three of us here, you, me and Pam who have read and enjoyed this novel this January :)

10. Dead Giveaway by Simon Brett.

This is one of the earlier outings for Simon Brett's down-at-heel actor Charles Paris, set in the early 1980s, and finds him ruing the realisation that his career seems to be continuing its general downward spiral. As the novel opens he is at least in work, but the role is far from glamorous.

West End Television, a local commercial station in London, has a long-established record of focusing on the less intellectually stretching end of the television market, and is eager to move into the rapidly expanding field of game shows. To this end, it has secured the UK rights to a successful American TV game show Hats Off and, is preparing to make a series under the revised name of If the Cap Fits.

This scenario offers Simon Brett the opportunity for a searing satire of the world of game shows. The basic premise behind If the Cap Fits is that contestants drawn from the general public, and paired with celebrities, have to guess which of four representatives of different professions would wear which hat. Charles Paris is there … not as one of the celebrities but as an actor, because for the wacky world of 1980s TV game shows, actors can obviously be represented by Tudor bonnets. Of course, the actor in question has to be someone whom the public would be unlikely to recognise, which renders it a role made for Charles Paris.

Needless to say, before very long someone is dead, in questionable circumstances, and Charles finds himself delving more deeply for clues. In this case, the victim is Barrett Doran, the unwholesome host of the game show, and there is a large cohort of potential perpetrators.

When one of the Assistant Producers of the programme is arrested as prime suspect, Charles is called upon by her friends to help clear her name. As ever, Charles in turn suspects virtually all of the potential suspects in turn before alighting on the actual killer.

Simon Brett is a master at combining a robust murder story and investigation with comedy. Charles Paris is an appealing character – far from perfect, but all too aware of his flaws. Brett also manages to satirise (gently but tellingly) the pitfalls and shortcomings of producing television fodder for the masses.

11. The Last Word by Elly Griffiths.

Elly Griffiths has rapidly become one of my favourite authors, and this book exemplifies why. She creates engaging and highly plausible characters, whom she then places in intricate (yet always credible) plots. Natalka, who first appeared in The Postscript Murders, which was published a few years ago, is one of my favourite fictional characters of recent years. Beautiful, Ukrainian and resourceful, she had been working as a carer at the start of that earlier novel, although she had also amassed a considerable fortune through her mastery of bitcoin, although this had caused significant problems for her in the past.

Following the events related in The Postscript Murders, she is now managing the carers’ agency that had previously employed her. She is living in Shoreham with ex-monk Benedict (who runs a coffee shop on the beach, known for the high quality of its drinks), although their apartment now feels cramped as her mother, Valentyna, has fled war-torn Ukraine and moved in with them. But Natalka has other strings to her formidable bow. She has also set up a detective agency, which she runs with Edwin, an octogenarian and former presenter on BBC Radio 3 (the classical music station), who had also feature in the previous book. Most of their cases have revolved around instances of suspected infidelity, at which Edwin has proved unexpectedly adept. He relies on the tendency of younger people generally to overlook older people in their vicinity, which has enabled him to become proficient at tailing the subjects of his investigations,

They are, however, delighted when they receive a more challenging commission, to investigate the sudden death of a celebrated author. As Natalka and Edwin delve into the available material, they uncover possible links to the deaths of other writers This leads to Edwin and Benedict (not technically part of the agency, but always willing to lend a hand) to enrol in a nearby writers’ retreat, which had also hosted several of the dead writers.

Elly Griffiths marshals her material adroitly, and also takes the opportunity for some insights, and perhaps in-jokes, about the writing community. The plot is intricate, with numerous twists, and unforeseen tangents, and the characters are excellently drawn. Edwin is portrayed exquisitely, and the contrast or comparison between him and Benedict is beautifully managed. Indeed, she is wonderful at creating unorthodox characters, and imbuing them with a deep verisimilitude. Literary prejudices are hard to shift, but should always be challenged. If I had known before embarking on Griffiths’ wonderful series of novels following Dr Ruth Galloway that one of the characters was a cloak-strewn modern Druid, I think I would have passed, and moved to another author. However, it is difficult now to imagine those books without the marvellous character of Cathbad. Similar reactions to the prospect of a former monk as protagonist would have robbed me of the joy of reading about Benedict, with all his failing confidence.

I have enjoyed all of Elly Griffiths’ books, and am additionally impressed at the speed with which she produces them. She seems to have published two books a year for several years now, without any suggestion of such prolific output compromising the high standard. I hope we get to read more about Natalka and Co very soon.

12. A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin.

I found this a very enjoyable and engaging novel. I was also intrigued to see how prophetic it was in many ways. It was written in 1982, some three years into Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office, and before the Falklands War, success in which did so much to secure Thatcher’s subsequent terms in office. It is set in the year or so following a general election in 1989 at which the Labour Party has ousted the previous Government of National Unity (presumably a Conservative-led Coalition) and secured an unexpected landslide victory.

As the novel opens, we are given the reactions of various Establishment stalwarts, including press barons, bankers, industrialists and several Civil Service mandarins, all of whom are appalled at the prospect of a genuinely socialist government assuming power. While they seethe with rage and fear we learn something of Perkins’s background.

As a young man Harry Perkins had followed his father into employment in a Sheffield steel mill. Once there he became involved in the trade union movement and quickly rose through the local ranks. Spotted as a potential high-flier, he was awarded a union scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, and continued his rapid progress through the part machinery until he was selected as an MP for his home town.

Following a spell as an energetic and diligent back bencher he enters what is clearly the Wilson/Callaghan Government of 1974 to 1979 (though neither of those two leaders is specifically named), eventually rising to Cabinet level with responsibility for maintaining the national grid. I think that this is intended for the cognoscenti as a veiled reference to Tony Benn. In this capacity, despite obstructions posed by officials in his own department, he awards a contract for a nuclear power station to British Industrial Fuels, and they duly build an installation by Lake Windermere.

When the Conservatives return to power under Mrs Thatcher following their own landslide victory in 1979 Perkins surprises everyone (perhaps including himself) by eventually becoming leader of the Labour Party. An election is called in 1989.

Perkins certainly has a radical suite of policies and is eager to commence the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal. He also threatens to dissolve the prevailing newspaper monopolies. As we have already read, the Establishment is appalled, and starts to fight back using its own range of weapons. Sir George Fison owns many of the most popular press titles and uses his papers to mount a concerted effort to undermine the new administration. Meanwhile the military Chiefs of Staff mobilise their own machinery, undertaking almost treasonous activities with Western Allies to circumvent the Government’s planned reductions. The various Whitehall Permanent Secretaries work together to confound the administrative process wherever possible. These mandarins are steely, ruthless characters – very far from the popular perception of Sir Humphrey, but with all of his determination to have their own way.

The author, Chris Mullin, would subsequently become a Labour MP and would even briefly serve in Government himself, although at the time that he wrote this novel he was an investigative journalist fighting high profile alleged miscarriages of justice. However, his understanding of the Whitehall machinery is very clear, and he paints a very plausible picture of the relationship between Ministers and senior officials. The novel is always entirely credible, and often very humorous. I particularly enjoyed a description of the drab corridors in the Treasury Building where I currently work.

The novel is also rather alarming as it displays the relative ease with which the combined forces of the banks, the press and senior officialdom can confound the aims of government, regardless of the size of the electoral mandate. One thinks of the persistent rumours, fuelled by memoirs from the likes of Peter Wright, of concerted campaigns by the intelligence community to undermine the Wilson government in the 1970s.

>26 Eyejaybee: This book completely passed me by when it was published 1982, probably because I was in the process of emigrating. It is now on my TBR list.....thanks. Coming from someone who works in Whitehall, how could I ignore it?

>25 Eyejaybee: I too, enjoy Elly Griffith's books. I will look for this one in my library.

>27 scunliffe: I hope you enjoy it.

13. Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs.

As I embarked up this novel I had very high hopes for it. Apart from any other considerations, I was intrigued by the setting, having previously had no knowledge about Montreal at all. Sadly, my initial rapture faded fairly quickly.

As I understand it, I believe Kathy Reichs was prompted to write this novel from a sense of pique at the success of Patricia Cornwell’s books featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta. Apparently Reichs felt that Scarpetta’s role and background was very close to her own, and believed that she might be able to do better. I am not convinced that she has, although to be fair, after a great start with her first four or five novels, I think that Patricia Cornwell started to lose her way, too.

However, enter Dr Temperance (‘Tempé’) Brennan, her counterpart to Lay Scarpetta. Brennan is American but has spent the last year working in Montreal, liaising with the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal, the local municipal police force, and the Sûreté du Québec which covers the whole of the Province. While I am sure that the technical content relating to the forensic anthropology and autopsy procedures is correct (or at least more than good enough to convince a scientific ignoramus such as myself), I found the story less than gripping. For a start it seems unnecessarily long, coming in at around 560 pages in the edition I read. That included an awful lot of padding.

I also felt that Ms Reichs succumbed to too many crime story tropes. Right from the beginning, Tempé’ finds herself clashing with Detective Claudel, the officer leading the investigation. While I am glad that I read this, I doubt that I will be pressing much further with the series.

14. The Final Round by Bernard O'Keeffe.

I am always keen to discover a new fictional detective, and Inspector Garibaldi, working in the Barnes area of South London, is a welcome addition to the cadre. Of course, as is now mandatory for any fictional detective, he has a complicated backstory. In his case, we learn that he separated from his wife a few years ago, and that she has taken up with a very wealthy new partner, and that, as a consequence, their son now attends a very exclusive private school. There are also oblique references to some sort of breakdown that Garibaldi suffered.

Barnes is situated on the south bank of the Thames, and is probably best known to non-Londoners as being on the route of the Boat Race, with the competing boats having to shoot the central span of Barnes Bridge. It tends to be overrun with sightseers on Boat Race Day, and the pubs do huge business, although the influx of outsiders is less welcome to most of the local residents. It is on the evening of Boat Race Day that the novel opens, with someone being murdered in the parkland around the Leg of Lamb Pond.

Two weeks earlier, a group of six people who had known each other decades ago as students at Balfour College, Oxford, had gathered for their annual reunion, which took the form of a charity pub quiz. This year, it all went fairly smoothly until a mystery voice offered some salacious statements about each of the six alumni, and asked the assembled crowd to decide which (if any) they thought were true. It is this exchange that sets in motion the events that will lead to the murder.

This sets the scene for Inspector Garibaldi and his colleagues to investigate, which they do capably. The plot is well thought through, and the necessary clues are there (even if I didn’t spot all of them myself). This is merely the first in a series, which already stretches to three books, and I am looking forward to reading more.

I read Deja Dead some years ago, as my mom was a fan of the TV show Bones, and was also extremely underwhelmed. It seemed to particularly suffer from the modern mystery novel disease of requiring a very smart main character to lose all their intelligence for a while in order to make the plot work/get the character in the right place.

>32 mabith: Yes, I found Dr Brennan's complete abandonment of any semblance of common sense, after having gone to such lengths to demonstrate how smart she was, very irritating.

15. Simply Lies by David Baldacci.

I am not sure why I hadn’t read any of David Baldacci’s novels before. I know he has been prolific, and his book are immensely popular – perhaps there was some subconscious attempt to resist that aspect of the crime fiction zeitgeist. If I am going to be honest, I only really tried this because I was able to buy an e-copy at a ridiculously cheap price.

It was money well spent because I found it very enjoyable. I was gripped within a few paragraphs, and found myself enmeshed in a very complex plot involving various local and federal police and investigative agencies, and the extensive tendrils of organised crime gangs. Mickey Gibson works from home in her role as asset tracer for a prominent private investigation agency. A former police detective, she has moved into the private sector to utilise their more flexible working pattern so that she can also look after her two young children. One morning, shortly after concluding a case discussion with her boss, she takes a call from someone else purporting to work in the organisation asking her to check out a substantial property nearby.

This pitches her into a murder investigation, and brings her up against Francine Langhorne, an expert in the art of manipulation, who has a very complicated agenda of her own. The story develops along several directions, and moves with great pace. Baldacci doesn’t indulge in deep or detailed descriptions of his characters, but they all come across as highly plausible.

I enjoyed reading this, and will certainly look for more books by Baldacci.

16. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard.

This novel is now over forty years old, and it has not aged well. Nowadays when broadcasting programmes that were originally aired several decades ago, the BBC often gives a warning that it reflects opinions and attitudes prevalent in that time. This book would certainly be subject to any such caveats.

However, it was not just the heavy scattering of heavily racist and sexist views that made it difficult to read. The approach to telling the story was very different, and the absence of detail or any attempt to delve beneath the skin of the characters was all too apparent.

17. The Tour: The Story of the England Cricket Team Overseas 1877-2022 by Simon Wilde.

This is a comprehensive history of the overseas tours by England’s cricket teams, stretching from 1878 up to the Ashes tour of Australia in the winter of 2021/22.

Simon Wilde has been reporting on cricket for decades and followed a lot of these tours himself. Obviously, the initial prospect of a tour to a warmer climate during the depths of the English winter is alluring, but Wilde’s account shows how arduous such tours can become.

In the early days, such tours were taken under the aegis of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), rather than badged as England. Several weeks were required in which to cram in all the necessary games (which would include a full test series against the host country’s national team, strewn among a handful of other fixtures against local and regional teams, often of widely varying calibre, and on some unkempt, and occasionally downright hazardous, pitches. Indeed, up until the early 1960s, not only was a great swathe of time required to accommodate the various fixtures, but teams might find themselves spending several weeks on a boat sailing to and them from the host country.

Cricket tours encountered all sorts of problems, ranging from local political unrest and agitations against unpopular governments to full on demonstrations aimed at the cricketers themselves. Administrative and consular support was not always available, and shortage of money could often be a problem. Sometimes the host country had only sporadic provision of aspects of infrastructure taken for granted back home. Often the attitudes of the players or their managers provoked wider problems.

Wilde delve into all of these issues and more. Having been a passionate cricket fan for many years, I was engrossed by much of the content of this book. It is always nice to have distant memories of hitherto long forgotten incidents sparked into life. My own slight cavil was that the book would have benefited from a few more light-hearted anecdotes, which might have broken up hat occasionally felt like a turgid serving of Geoffrey Boycott’s batting of the deadest of dead pitches.

18. Private Lessons by Bernard O'Keeffe.

I am indebted to The Times for recently choosing to review Every Trick in the Book, the most recent book by Bernard O’Keeffe. I hadn’t been aware of him until then, but their enticing review encouraged me to try him out, leading me to read his first novel, which introduces Detective Inspector Garibaldi, who lives and works in Barnes, situated in west London on the south bank of the Thames. This novel is Inspector Garibaldi’s second outing, and easily lived up to the promise of the first.

It opens with the discovery of the body of Giles Gallen, a young local man who had been working as a private tutor for several wealthy households in the area. We soon learn that in affluent Barnes, the use of a private tutor to enhances children’s learning is commonplace – indeed, almost de rigeur in some of the more exalted circles. Giles had been highly rated for his skills as a tutor, and his services were hired out by Forum, an ambitious local agency.

One of Giles’s clients is a wealthy Italian family who are currently residing in an opulent Barnes mansion. During the summer they had returned home for several weeks, taking Giles with them for a long and luxurious break. Everyone is astounded when Giles is killed. The mystery deepens when one of his friends, who had also worked for Forum, is attacked in the street, and urged to keep their mouth shut, although they are not told what should be kept secret.

I found Inspector Garibaldi an empathetic character. He is an avid reader and an auto-didact, and has developed a tendency towards pedantry which is often manifested by an urge, which he battles against, to correct his colleagues’ grammar or errant literary allusions. I have worked with several people like that, and found him highly plausible. He also works well with Gardner, his Detective Sergeant, who is less well informed on cultural issues, and who consequently has some comic misunderstandings of Garibaldi’s comments.

Garibaldi has a fair amount of baggage arising from domestic woes, and worries that his son is being unduly influenced by his ex-wife’s wealthy new partner. There have also been references throughout this book and its predecessor to an apparent breakdown a few years ago, although no further information has been forthcoming to date.

The plot is well-constructed, and I particularly enjoyed reading about the setting. I have been to Barnes a few times, and always enjoyed my time there, and am looking forwards to exploring it further, and checking out some of the landmarks mentioned in the books.

19. The Camel Club by David Baldacci.

I found this thriller very entertaining. I had got rather out of the habit of reading books like this, and had forgotten how enjoyable a well-written thriller can be.

Set a few years after the 9/11 attacks, it recounts a plot against the American President hatched by a group featuring radicalised Islamists, and the various countermeasures undertaken by the various (indeed, numerous) intelligence and security agencies. The Camel Club of the title is a group of disaffected citizens living in and around Washington DC who have been reviewing the proliferation of power accumulated by the security agencies in the wake of 9/11, along with all sorts of conspiracy theories abounding within the fringes of life in the capital.

The principal member of the Camel Club now goes by the name of Oliver Stone, in a nod to the film director’s works challenging aspects of the establishment version of history. We gradually learn that he has a dark history in which under his real name he had been an accomplished servant of the agencies on which he now attempts to keep tabs.

The narrative continually moves perspective, at different times following Stone, initiates of the terrorist group, or members of the various security organisations. This was managed deftly, and enhanced, rather than hampered, the flow of the story.

20. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.

I have always been a huge fan of Arthur C Clarke’s novels, and this, which was his first major commercial and critical success, was apparently his own favourite. Published in 1953, as the Cold War was gathering in intensity, the novel starts with the Americans and Russians in the midst of a space race (prefiguring the bitter competition that would flourish during the latter half of that decade and then throughout the 1960s). This is, however, rendered redundant by the arrival of a fleet of huge spaceships from an alien race, immensely more powerful and technologically accomplished than mankind.

The aliens, known informally as The Overlords, assume power over the Earth almost immediately, with the human population realising that resistance would be pointless. The Overlords are benign, and under their suzerainty the world embarks upon an extended period of peace, accompanied by a surge of technological advancement and economic growth. The world’s woes are largely vanquished, and the population can concentrate on a life dominated by leisure. Not everyone is happy – some feel that their cosseted existence is robbing mankind of its initiative and ability to progress.

Clarke’s description of the Utopian lifestyle afforded the world under the benevolent guidance of The Overlords is beguiling and demonstrates his awesome prescience. In a throwaway remark he predicts the introduction of a readily accessible, reliable oral contraceptive and something that seems remarkably, almost frighteningly, similar to DNA fingerprinting, decades before either would become a reality.

I think that Clarke was a great science fiction writer because, in addition to being an accomplished scientist, he had that happy knack, so rare among other performers in the genre, of being a genuinely good writer. He understands the intricacies of plotting and development of plausible, sympathetic characters. In Childhood’s End, plausible characters abound, ranging from gushing socialite Rupert Boyce, independent and dangerously inquisitive astrophysicist Jan Rodricks; and the domesticated Gregsons, George and Jean and their two children. Clarke’s compelling verisimilitude over the everyday makes the fantastic seem utterly credible. More than seventy years since its publication, and nearly forty since I first read it, the book remains just as gripping, enjoyable and rewarding.

>29 Eyejaybee: It is available only as an eBook. My iPad has decided it won't work. sighhhhhhhhh

21. Lost and Never Found by Simon Mason.

I enjoyed Simon Mason’s first two novels featuring the mismatched paid of Detective Inspectors, Ray and Ryan Wilkins, taking especial delight in the wholly inappropriate behaviour of Ryan in contrast to the wholly correct Ray. Embarking on the third novel, however, I felt that the novelty had well and truly worn off, and I actually found Ryan’s antics simply annoying.

The plot seemed rather flimsy, too, and after having looked forward to reading it, I found myself very disappointed with the book.

22. The Tooth Tattoo by Peter Lovesey.

The thirteenth novel featuring the churlish Superintendent Peter Diamond represents a welcome return to top form for Peter Lovesey. The action is, as usual, set in Bath but this time centres around the intense circles of string quartets.

The body of a young Japanese woman is retrieved from the Avon, and she is identified by means of a tooth tattoo in the form of a musical note. Further investigation reveals that she had been passionate about classical music and had formed an obsession about Staccati, a leading string quartet that has only recently resumed performing, having replaced their virtuoso viola payer who had disappeared four years previously. As might be expected, all four members of Staccati have their own idiosyncrasies, and it is surprising that they have managed to stay together. However, when united for a performance they cohere with devastating impact.

Lovesey has obviously undertaken a huge amount of research and imparts a wealth of information about the type of music that string quartets play, without ever seeming to lecture or harangue his readers. Even the surly, Diamond, who generally wears his philistinism as a badge of pride, briefly succumbs to the power of music, although regular readers will be relieved to know that his customary bad temper soon reasserts itself.

The plot moves through various twists, but never loses credibility, and, as usual, the city of Bath plays a huge role. I wonder whether Lovesey receives commission from the city's tourist board, and I am surprised that, given how photogenic the city is, these books have not made their way onto television.

23. Every Trick in the Book by Bernard O'Keeffe.

This marks the third outing for Detective Inspector Jim Garibaldi (‘like the biscuit’, as he has become tired of acknowledging whenever anyone seems surprised by his surname), and is a very welcome return. Garibaldi lives and works in Barnes, a village-like district of London found on the south bank of the Thames.

Garibaldi is that relatively rare character, a bookish policeman, and while his biggest regret is that he never had the opportunity to go to university, he in an academic manqué, which manifests itself in his frequent inability to stop himself publicly correcting his colleagues’ grammar, or making comments designed primarily to let others know how clever he is. Despite this, he is an engaging and empathetic character.

I had already enjoyed this series with its clever plots and entirely plausible characters, with the added spur of knowing Barnes fairly well.. Bernard O’Keeffe’s description of it is affectionate and accurate. However, I found this instalment especially enjoyable as I have always loved metafiction. This book opens with Garibaldi and his domestic partner Rachel attending a public reading of a crime novel by the local author who had recently retired from their work as a teacher at a nearby independent school. The novel revolves around the death of its primary protagonist, who also turned pout to be a recently retired teacher who had worked at a private school near the Thames.

Life imitates art yet further when the novelist is killed in exactly the same way, and in exactly the same place, as the protagonist of the novel. Similarities then emerge between various aspects of the dead man’s life and that of his character. Garibaldi and his colleagues investigate, and find themselves enmeshed in complications as they try to unravel the similarities and contrasts between the real and fictional lives. The vicinity of Barnes is lovingly depicted, and emerges almost as another character in the book.

I am already now impatiently waiting for the next book in the series.

24. Anna O by Matthew Blake.

There was a certain serendipity about my purchase of this book. I read a favourable short review of it in The Times, but decided to buy it as a consequence of a misunderstanding about the author. I misconstrued a throwaway comment in the review, and thought that Matthew Blake was a pseudonym for another writer whose recent spy fiction I had greatly enjoyed.

This was not, then, the espionage thriller that I had anticipated, but it proved no less enjoyable for that. It actually recounts the bizarre story of a young woman who was presumed to have murdered two friends and business partners while sleepwalking, and has remained in a state of sleep or catalepsy ever since – a span of four years at the time the book opens. That must sound bizarre, but this is all conveyed in a far more plausible manner in the book than my synopsis would suggest.

The book is largely narrated by Dr Ben Prince, a psychologist specialising in sleep issues, and especially cases of very deep sleep, with occasional interpolations from other characters, including Prince’s estranged wife (who was the first police officer on the scene of the original murders), and a woman who had been trying to investigate an infamous similar crime that had happened twenty years earlier.

I was hooked within the first three or four pages, and found the book positively fizzed along. While there is a lot of discussion of the psychological aspects of irregular sleep patterns and sleep deprivation, the jargon is never allowed to intrude in an awkward and inaccessible manner.

25. To Kill a Troubadour by Martin Walker.

Well over a dozen books in, this series shows no sign of tailing off in quality. True, Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges, the Chief of Police for the Dordogne village of St Denis and the surrounding area, may sometimes seem almost too good to be true. However, the strong cast of characters, the sumptuous descriptions of the amazing meals that Bruno cooks, and the glorious landscape that Walker portrays, together with solid and soundly constructed plots and a regular cast of appealing characters, all make for very enjoyable reading.

Walker is also adept at remaining highly topical. While St Denis and its neighbouring countryside might sometimes seem like an oasis from an earlier time, he peppers his story with a lot of references to contemporary issues. This book touches on the dispute in Ukraine, while focusing more closely on unrest in Spain following the attempted secession of Catalonia from Spanish rule. Fake news and Russian bots are in evidence, and Bruno finds himself once again working with the shadier elements of the French security services.

Another winner. I was glad to have read this, but am sadly conscious that I have now almost caught up with Walker’s output, and will all too soon be right up to date with the sequence.

26. A Comedian Dies by Simon Brett.

I find Charles Paris a very engaging character. Now middle-aged (there are hints in this novel that he has just entered his fifties, although, paradoxically, in some of the later books the approaching milestone of fifty looms over him very menacingly – a feeling I recall all too clearly) he is more or less resigned to playing out the remainder of his acting career in minor roles.

As the novel opens, we find Charles enjoying a temporary rapprochement with his long-suffering wife Frances, and they are spending a week in Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast. Now long beyond its Victorian heyday, the allure of Hunstanton as a holiday resort has faded, and finding the weather relentlessly miserable, Charles and Frances take refuge one afternoon in a ‘summer’ revue matinee, an old-fashioned variety show featuring a selection of musical acts, dancers, conjurers, jugglers and a couple of comedians. Even when this book was published, some forty years ago, the live variety show was already a fading and dated phenomenon, and the ensemble performing at Hunstanton was unlikely to reverse that downward trend.

Charles is, however, intrigued to see that one of the comedians on the bill is Lennie Barber, who many years ago had enjoyed considerable success as the leading partner in Barber and Pole, one of the most popular comic double acts of the 1950s. Another of the acts in the show, Bill Peaky, has been widely tipped for future stardom and has already secured a considerable fanbase from his occasional television appearances. However, his career is truncated in the most brutal fashion when he is electrocuted on stage as a consequence of a faulty connection in the stage sound system.

As usual, Charles Paris suspects that there is more to this than simple mischance, and becomes involved in one of his amateur investigations, which also affords him the opportunity to try out a selection of disguises, and to use some of the different voices and accents that he has employed throughout his startlingly unsuccessful acting career. This novel marked one of the first occasions in which Charles accompanies his disguises with reminiscences of the generally negative comments from critics. Like so many actors, he tends only to remember the particularly cruel comments that reviewers have offered up.

Also as usual, Charles ends up suspecting virtually everyone in scope of the investigation in turn before eventually discovering the actual culprit. I realise that this might all sound rather bland and predictable, but Simon Brett writes in an appealing manner, and the insights into different aspects of the theatrical and television worlds that his books afford are always enjoyable.

27. Seasons in the Sun by Dominic Sandbrook.*

This fourth volume of Dominic Sandbrook’s immense history of the 1970s and 1980s opens with 1974, now best remembered as a year of two general elections, and, as it happens, comes into the period from which my clearer awareness of politics begins. Sandbrook catalogues the trials and success of the Labour Governments under Harold Wilson and then Jim Callaghan in close, but never intrusive detail. While he focuses on the politics of the day, he sets them against a fascinating portrayal of the prevailing social and cultural context (including the horrors, and occasional delights, of 1970s rock music and television programmes).

One figure who looms large in the political toing and froing is Tony Benn, although for much of that period he was still in his intermediate incarnation of Anthony Wedgwood Benn (the persona that he initially adopted after successfully renouncing his title of Viscount Stansgate, in order to remain eligible for the House of Commons). Indeed, although he remained in the Cabinet throughout the Wilson and Callaghan administration, he represented one of the Government’s most trenchant opponents, frequently undermining, or even directly opposing, policies agreed by his colleagues. I certainly remember him as a divisive figure from that period, and one who frequently provoked the bitterest tirades from my father when his latest ‘enormity’ was announced on the television news. There was little indication then of the figurehead of respect into which he would metamorphose by the end of his political career just a few years ago.

The historian and political thinker Sanatyana famously observed that those who do not study the past may be condemned to relive it, and Sandbook’s marvellous book certainly seems to offer proof of that worthy dictum. Harold Wilson has gone down in history as being paranoid, and convinced that he was being undermined, and conspired against, by various factors within the Establishment, including MI5 and the rest of the security and intelligence services. His paranoia was not groundless, and his own Cabinet remained a hotbed of dissension, featuring a broad church of left wing views. Tony Benn followed his own path on the far left, hurling money at workers’ collectives indiscriminately and with scant regard of the economic realities for their business plans (if anything so elaborate ever existed beyond the crumpled back of an envelope or fag packet), while other prominent figures (Callaghan and Denis Healey prominent –though not alone – among them) veered far further towards the right of the party (despite Healey’s youthful membership of the Communist Party). Other more stalwart figures, such as Barbara Castle and Anthony Crosland, tried to hold firm to socialist principles while conceding the pragmatic need for occasional compromise.

What emerges most clearly from Sandbrook’s account is the extent to which Wilson seemed desperate to retain power, while simultaneously acknowledging how little he enjoyed it and the extent to which high office robbed all pleasure from his life. In recent years, we have become obsessed by the extent to which political advisers and consultants, lurking in the background at Number 10, have come to exert undue influence, almost to the extent of subverting the democratic process. After all, the New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 had the likes of Damian McBride, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls coming to the fore as special advisers (before the latter pair’s election to Parliament in their own right), while the Conservatives had their own Machiavellian figures such as Dominic Cumming and Henry de Zoete functioning behind the scenes during the Coalition and beyond. This is not a new phenomenon. Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) was Harold Wilson’s political adviser, and seemed to exert unprecedented control within Number 10, even to the extent of managing the Prime Minister’s diary to the exclusion of his officials. Sandbrook’s account suggests that Wilson may even have been physically scared of Ms Williams – certainly not likely to help him overcome his paranoia.

The greatest political issue in Britain over recent years has been the continuing reverberation of the country’s decision, in the referendum of 2016, to leave the European Union. For a few years thereafter, Brexit dominated every political report, and it cluttered the current legislative agenda within parliament, to the extent that manifesto commitments across other departments have had to be dropped for the moment, despite one parliamentary session being stretched to double its customary length. In 1975, the country faced its first referendum on Europe. While Edward Heath had taken the country into what was then the EEC without a referendum, leaving the elected parliament to ratify entry, in its manifestos for both elections in 1974 Labour had committed to holding a referendum to confirm that membership should continue. What struck me most sharply was the prescience of some campaigners against continued membership, pointing to the threat of eventual loss of legislative sovereignty. I still think that the referendum decision was wrong, but I was intrigued to see what I had conceived as relatively new concerns voiced by the ‘Brexiters’ had been articulated (often far more articulately) forty years earlier by the likes of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn. Harold Wilson allowed his Cabinet free rein as to their views, and took virtually no part in the campaign himself, beyond an early indication that he believed that, having gone in, we should stay in.

Another precursor to more recent times arose in the form of referendums in Scotland and Wales about devolution and an element of home rule. Indeed, it was the Government’s insistence upon specific victory requirements (i.e. in addition to a majority of votes actually cast, that forty per cent of the whole electorate must vote in favour of devolution) that led to the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists withdrawing support from the embattled Labour administration. This in turn led to the Government losing the vote of confidence that led to the spring election in 1979 (Callaghan had decided to try to hold out until the autumn, by which time he hoped that improvements in the economy would have become more evident). ‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’ was Callaghan’s judgement.

I turned eleven in 1974, and the elections had a particular relevance for me as in September, I entered Loughborough Grammar School. This school was one of a few ‘direct grant’ schools scattered around the country. Some of each year’s intake of new pupils at these schools (around half, in the case of Loughborough Grammar School in 1974) were supported by the local authority while the remainder were subject to fees paid by their parents. During its period in opposition, the Labour Party had committed to abolishing direct grant schools, leaving great uncertainty among the parents of prospective pupils scheduled to join in September 1974. This uncertainty was, of course, replicated across many other policy areas when the general election in February proved so inconclusive.

Sandbrook deals with education in great detail, offering an entertaining insight into life at Crichton School in North London. In the early 1970s this school was experimenting in a liberal approach, under the headship of Molly Hattersley, wife of future deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley. I found this, too, particularly engrossing as Crichton subsequently metamorphosed into Muswell Hill’s Fortismere School (situated literally across the road from me as I type this) which, after sinking to seeming limitless depths of inadequacy during the 1980s, is now the flagship school of the London Borough of Haringey.

Sandbrook extends his clarity of insight into the troubles in Northern Ireland, which he covers with equanimity and neutrality, as well as documenting the emergence, and almost as meteoric decline of punk rock, while plumbing the depredations of progressive rock.

Following on from his previous books, Never had it so Good, White Heat, and State of Emergency, this volume bring a triumphant conclusion to a supreme feat of academic endeavour. His greatest success is his ability to approach complex subjects and render them accessible to the modern reader.

I had never heard of this series of histories, probably because I left England in 1980.
I was 10 in 1956, when the series starts, and I often wonder how accurate my memory is of the subsequent years, so the first v volume at least is now firmly on my to-read list.

28. Absolute Power by David Baldacci.

This was David Baldacci’s first novel, and he clearly got off to a flying start.

A professional burglar breaks into an opulent house near Washington DC. He has done his research, and confidently expects that the house will be empty, as the occupants are supposed to be on holiday in the Caribbean. However, while he is in the property, he hears people coming into the house, and as luck would have it, they come up to the master bedroom, where he had been clearing out the contents of a large walk-in safe. He withdraws into the safe, pulling it closed behind him. At this point he realises that the mirror on the door of the safe is two-way, and from his vantage point he watches proceeding unfold.

And those proceedings are noteworthy. The newcomers on the scene are the young wife of the octogenarian owner of the house and her new lover, who happens also to be the President of the United States. Things do not go to plan, and the woman ends up dead, shot by members of the President’s security detail, who, it seems, accompany him even on such trysts. After the President and his party withdraw, the burglar makes good his escape, stopping only to retrieve a vital piece of evidence of what has taken place.

Initially unaware that a witness has been on the scene, the President’s party return to the scene to clear away al traces, and become aware that a burglar had been there, and that evidence has gone missing. This leads to a massive clandestine operation to discover who is involved, and what they might plan to do with their knowledge.

This may all sound rather contrived, but that is more down to my clumsy synopsis. To the reader, it all comes across with great urgency and plausibility, and I was caught up right from the start. I believe that before becoming a full time writer, Baldacci was a solicitor, but his spare and clear prose, and his ability to unwind a compelling and gripping story suggest he might also have made an admirable journalist.

29. The Stone Wife by Peter lovesey.

I may have remarked before that I am surprised that Peter Lovesey's novels featuring Superintendent Peter Diamond haven't found been dramatised for television. After all, the combination of the photogenic city of Bath, the irascible protagonist and the engaging and soundly constructed plots strikes me as a winning formula, readily susceptible of the same effect that the Inspector Morse series has had for Oxford.

This latest instalment, which revolves around the shooting at an auction room of a scholar specialising in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, is a welcome addition to the series. Superintendent Diamond is always entertaining, alternating between down to earth common sense and explosive rage, and in this latest outing he also displays hitherto unsuspected remorse and concern for the wellbeing of his junior detectives. Having spent much of my time as a student translating Old and Middle English literature, and having read through the whole of The Canterbury Tales in the original, I particularly enjoyed the various details that Lovesey shares about the Wife of Bath and her tale (the Stone Wife of the title). He had clearly done a lot of research into Chaucer and his works, because the comments and opinions offered up throughout the story are all perfectly valid.

Lovesey tends towards the gentler end of modern crime fiction, and doesn't subject his readers to the more gory aspects that so frequently proliferate in crime novels today. Indeed, one of the more notable facets of Superintendent Diamond's psyche is his reluctance to attend post-mortem examinations. The corollary of this is that, occasionally, the plots veer away from strict plausibility. This is not, however, necessarily a fatal flaw. The novels may be slightly escapist, but they are certainly enjoyable, and Lovesey uses Diamond's prickly sensitivity and his interaction with junior colleagues (the feisty Sergeant Ingeborg Smith in particular) to great effect.

30. Twelve Secrets by Robert Gold.

More than twenty years ago, Ben Harper’s life was ripped apart when his fourteen year old brother was one of two schoolboys brutally murdered by two girls of the same age. The girls had shown no remorse throughout their trial, and had been convicted and imprisoned. Just over ten years ago they had been released with new identities, and under strict injunctions never to revisit the small town in the close hinterland of London in which they had grown up, and where the killings had taken place.

Ben still lives in what had been the family home, and commutes into London when necessary for his work. He is now an investigative journalist working for a leading news website, and is asked by his editor if he will consider writing a piece about what had happened as another anniversary linked to the crime approaches. Initially (and understandably) reluctant, Ben is gradually convinced, especially in the light of a related news story suddenly breaking.

The plot is a bit of a whirlwind ride, with new twists constantly arising, and the field of suspects frequently shifting. Robert Gold catches the feel (almost claustrophobic at times) of a small town very capably, and his characters are all finely drawn. I was initially reluctant to embark on this book, being wary about the hype it seemed to have provoked, but I think that all the plaudits are definitely deserved.

31. What Bloody Man is That by Simon Brett.

Charles Paris is back, this time playing a selection of minor roles in a new production of Macbeth at the Pinero Theatre in Warminster, which is being directed by his old friend, Gavin Scholes. Other members of the cast include: John B Murgatroyd, an itinerant actor whose career has been almost as devastatingly unsuccessful as Charles's; George Birkett, a man who despite possessing little more than journeyman ability has encountered considerable commercial success through having played pedestrian roles in a selection of mindless situation comedies; Felicia Chatterton, an alluring yet intense actress whose previous career has been almost exclusively served in the Royal Shakespeare Company and who has to devote hours to think herself into her role; and Warnock Belvedere, an outrageous old ham who prides himself on being a theatrical "character" encompassing all the worst traits of old self-aggrandising stars but sadly without any compensatory talent.

Almost from the start Belvedere shows himself to be obnoxious, overriding the feelings of anyone else in the company and blatantly undermining the director. Within days of the company first coming together there is no-one whom he has not driven to utter fury. Consequently, there is an immense feeling of relief, which politeness and propriety do little to hide, when he is found dead in the cellar of the theatre's bar, having apparently fallen over and knocked himself out while simultaneously dislodging the CO2 hoses. Drunk and unconscious he rapidly succumbed to asphyxiation. This is put down as a dreadful accident, and just another manifestation of the dreadful luck that historically bedevils companies staging "the Scottish Play".

Predictably the body is discovered by Charles who, having himself overdone things in the bar earlier in the evening, had fallen asleep in his dressing room and awakened a few hours later to find himself locked in the theatre. It is only gradually afterwards, as he struggles to reconstruct the events of the night, that Charles recognises vital clues that serve to indicate that Belvedere's death was murder. He also realises, equally gradually, that the perpetrator must be another member of the theatre company.

Brett is always capable of weaving an intricate yet plausible plot, which he lightly peppers with humour. Charles Paris is always a sympathetic character - flawed (a virtual alcoholic and recalcitrant philanderer) yet essentially well-meaning, even to the point of frequent self-disgust. The conflicting ambitions and lifestyles of the different members of the theatrical company are also well constructed, and Brett clearly knows the theatrical milieu very well. Brett is also sufficiently conversant with the text and subtexts of Macbeth to throw in some convincing exegesis of the play's more obscure stretches.

Most entertaining on a number of levels!

32. The Collectors by David Baldacci.

After several years in which I largely eschewed the thriller as a genre, I have found myself rapidly becoming addicted to the books of David Baldacci. I don’t know whether this represents the passage of years eroding unnecessary genre divisions in my preferences, or a hardening of the cerebral arteries and weakening of my discernment. Whichever it might be, I have been enjoying racing through several of Baldacci’s books, which certainly seem capable of snaring and retaining my attention within a few pages.

This is the second in the Camel Club series, and marks a welcome return for the staunch campaigner who has adopted the name of Oliver Stone to betoken his utter cynicism towards the corridors of power in Washington, along with his various partners. It is one of the less prominent members of the club who initially becomes involved in the tangled plotline. Caleb Shaw works at the Library of Congress where he supervises some of the most rare and valuable books owned by the nation.

A quiet and withdrawn man, Caleb perhaps epitomises the stereotypical perception of a librarian. He is, therefore, notably ill-equipped to find the body of his suddenly deceased director at the door to the Library’s inner vault. Indeed, he passes out at the scene, although that subsequently proves to be less straightforward than initially thought. Just a few days earlier, the newly-appointed Speaker of the House of Representatives, who had established a reputation as a crusader against corruption, had been assassinated.

Meanwhile, Annabelle Conroy, a highly dexterous hustler, is putting together a complicated and ambitious scam to defraud the head of one of the largest and most crooked casinos in Atlantic City. As the events in Washington DC unfold, she is engaged in gathering a powerful crew to assist her.

Baldacci ties these various plot strands together seamlessly. His characters are carefully drawn, and I find the membership of the Camel Club both credible and empathetic. The book fairly fizzes along, too, and I was absolutely hooked.

33. Death on the Thames by Alan Johnson.

I have always enjoyed politicians' memoirs, and Alan Johnson’s first volume of autobiography, This Boy, must rank as one of the best I have read. I was particularly keen to read it as Johnson had, briefly, been Secretary of State in my Department. It's true that, throughout his short period in the Department for Education, he had been conspicuous principally by his virtual invisibility but I still thought that he might have some juicy morsel to dispense, with which to whet the salacious appetites of my fellow functionaries. As it happens, that book drew to a close before his political career had even started, and while I enjoyed the subsequent volumes (Please Mr Postman and The Long and Winding Road), they didn’t quite match the first one for its dramatic impact.

Since his retirement from front line politics, Johnson has gone a considerable way towards acquiring ‘national treasure’ status, partially as a consequence of the volumes of memoirs mentioned above, which show a great triumph over considerable early adversity, but also from his pragmatic and open approach, and his self-deprecating sense of humour.

Since then he has reinvented himself as a crime writer, and this is his third novel to feature Louise Mangan, now at the lofty rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. The novel opens, however, back in 1999, when Louise was a relative newcomer to the force, and still in the rank of Constable. As the book opens, she is engaged in an operation designed to catch a man who has been assaulting women in Southwest London. A man is arrested … indeed, Louise herself arrests him, but owing to the odd circumstances, she is never wholly satisfied that he is the actual assailant.

Meanwhile, preparations are under way for a monthly television programme highlighting prominent crimes. Although the programme has reached its current popularity as a consequence of close collaboration between the police and the programme makers, an issue has arisen. The producers want to lead with a story exposing the leader of a gang responsible for a massive proportion of the capital’s drug deals, but the police are threatening to withdraw their cooperation. And then the glamorous female presenter of the show is shot dead on her own doorstep. There are obvious resonances with the real murder of Jill Dando, who had presented Crimewatch for the BBC. Those similarities are carried further in the book, cleverly woven through the main plotline of the story.

Johnson’s ministerial career included a brief stint as Home Secretary, and he clearly draws on insights culled from those days in his portrayal of the working relationships (and especially the jealousies and resentments) between officers in the top echelons of the Metropolitan Police Service. He also portrays some of the sexism and racism with which many officers have to contend, and a lot of issues that are currently drawing media attention are brought into focus.

I particularly enjoyed Johnson’s deployment of his local knowledge. A lot of the action of the novel takes place on Tagg’s Island, a small island in the Thames near Hampton Court. Having never heard of this, I wonder ed whether Johnson had made it up to suit the requirements of the plot, but it does exist, and from my foray there over the Easter weekend, it is clear that Johnson knows it well, as he captures it very accurately.

This is a light-hearted yet still plausible novel, and highly entertaining.

34. A Chateau Under Siege by Martin Walker.

This latest instalment in the chronicles of Benoit ‘Bruno’ Courrèges, the Chief of Police in St Denis, a small provincial town in the Dordogne region of south west France, maintains the high quality of the series to date. It opens with Bruno and friends attending an elaborate reenactment of a medieval battle in one of the larger neighbouring towns, in which the invading English forces were routed by the locals. As the event nears its climax, the actor playing the charismatic leader of the French forces seems to depart from the rehearsed moves and suffers a serious injury,

This accident proves more serious than anticipated when more details about the injured man emerge. Although he had a long track record of eager participation in such historic re-enactments, he is actually a senior figure within the French security networks, and has been leading development of the country’s cybersecurity potential. The local police are left to wonder whether his injuries are the consequence of a genuine accident, or whether darker motives lie behind the incident.

As usual, Bruno finds himself being pulled in several different directions, struggling to fulfil his duties as a local policeman and pillar of the community while also being co-opted to help the security forces as they investigate further. Also, as usual, Bruno cooks some amazing meals, and generally keeps the local community ticking over. This may all sound rather twee, but the book is far from that, blending genuine excitement with yet another charming insight into life in the Dordogne.

I feel slightly sad as I have now caught up with Martin Walker – this is the most recent book in the series, although I understand that a new one is due for publication in a couple of months.

35. The Drift by C. J. Tudor.

This was a speculative buy, principally because it was on special offer in my local bookshop, and it was payday! Still, it proved a serendipitous discovery, and I found it very gripping.

I don’t know how many dystopian novels set in the aftermath of a destructive and disruptive pandemic. Until not long ago, it was all too easy to shrug and dismiss such a story as an intriguing idea, but not one that could really happen. Of course, we all know differently now.

The pandemic context underpinning this novel is that the world has clearly been challenged by a devastating virus, to such an extent that society has been riven, and some people whop have succumbed to the virus have been driven away, expelled like medieval outlaws.

The book takes the form of three narratives that seem to unfold simultaneously. One follows a group of people on a coach destined for a ‘Retreat’ although their role there is never made entirely clear. As the novel opens, while traversing some remote countryside, the coach crashes, and is pitched off the main road into a deep snow. Meanwhile, a small group of people find themselves in a cable car suspended high about a snowy landscape, which suddenly grinds to a halt. When the occupants recover their balance, they see that one of them is dead.

The third narrative follows a group of people at the Retreat itself, Located in remote countryside, the people running the centre have to contend with extremes of weather and wild animals , but their greatest concern comes from the Whistlers, terrifying strangers left to survive on the fringes of society.

C J Tudor weaves these threads together very capably, and the book fairly fizzes along. There are numerous twists along the way, and virtually all of them had me fooled.

36. Stone Cold by David Baldacci.

The Camel Club is back, and its members are up against it once again. We are aware that the man now known as ‘Oliver Stone’ has a shady past, and now it seems set to catch up with him. While this does work as a standalone novel, there are strong resonances from the Camel Club’s previous outings.

It appears that someone is killing members of the 666 Group, a secret cadre of highly trained assassins that had been run by the American intelligence service. The fact that someone is capable of killing such capable victims sends shockwaves through that cloistered community, and all sorts of conspiracy theories are unleashed.

Meanwhile, virtual Camel Club member Annabelle Conroy is still being pursued by the Atlantic City gangster whom she stung for $40 million in the previous novel. He is as tenacious as she is evasive.

As always, Baldacci ties all the various threads together very capably, and sucks the reader in right from the beginning of the book.

37. The Godfather by Mario Puzo.

Quite hypnotic! This novel paints an intriguing picture of the internecine struggles within the gangster community in New York in the late 1940s. It starts with various supplicants visiting Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather, on the day of his daughter's wedding to request a favour. On such a day Corleone is unable to decline any request. We see him respond to several requests, and are given an insight into the nuances that govern a revered mobster. While he agrees to act on one request, he makes clear that he is hurt by the way that particular supplicant had avoided contact with him in recent years. For others, he readily accepts the request and acquiesces. The message is passed down the ranks, and whichever deed or service is sought is discreetly delivered.

Vito Corleone is a surprisingly sympathetic character given that he leads one of the big five gangster families that between them control most of the crime bedevilling New York. When the thin patina of peace shatters, Corleone is shot and severely wounded, and then his eldest son is ambushed and killed. This proves to be the catalyst for his youngest son, Michael, hitherto remote from the family business, to step in and "make his bones", claiming his first murder. From that moment it is clear that he will succeed his father as The Don.

This book was published in the 1960s, but still feels remarkably sharp today. Obviously it is difficult to read it now other than through the prism of the almost legendary films that it spawned. It does, however, match them in its engrossing power.

38. Eleven Liars by Robert Gold.

This picks up more or less immediately after the end of Gold’s previous novel, Twelve Secrets, and once again focuses on Ben Harper as he tries to unravel a new set of mysteries. The novel opens with him walking back to his home in the riverside suburb of Haddley, when he notices a fire in the old community centre in the grounds of the local parish church.

Ever the reporter, he rushes to investigate, and realises that someone is trapped in the building. He manages to release them, but before he can check that they are unhurt they rush off into the night. This sets in motion a bizarre investigation that will involve the police, and rake over events from long in the past.

Robert Gold catches the atmosphere of the small, close-knit community in which several people have dark and old secrets very adeptly. The story switches between first person narrative from Ben, and third person accounts following a variety of protagonists. This is a well-plotted and entertaining novel.

39. Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer.*

George, Lord Byron, is a classic example of the paradox in which a generally ghastly person can produce sublime art or literature – somewhat in the mode of Salvador Dali. This month marks the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death, which was presumably behind the publication of this fascinating biography (which fortunately makes no attempt at hagiography, which would presumably be beyond even the literary skills of the subject himself).

I have to confess woeful ignorance of both the life and the works of Lord Byron, so I was rather surprised at just how outré his life was, encompassing rampant affairs with both sexes and a long-term incestuous relationship with his half-sister, with the constant accrual of staggering debts running on in the background. I had, of course, been aware of his Bohemian lifestyle, although not perhaps the extent of his licentiousness. Until reading this biography, I had not read much of his verse, although I have delighted in various cantos from Don Juan and Child Harold’s Pilgrimage by way of background reading while engaged with this book.

I was intrigued by Andrew Stauffer’s approach. Framing the biography through the device of ten letters works well, although it also flagged to me how poor a writer of prose Byron was. These letters do not speak in their style of a literary behemoth, but of a selfish, self-obsessed solipsist. Of course, the two things are not mutually exclusive, but no one would remember Byron for the scrawled offerings here, yet he seemed capable of dashing off a dazzling ode or a verse essay at the drop of a hat.

He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his more prominent long-term lovers, as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, and these letters suggest that he revelled in that reputation, and seemed eager always to push it even further.

40. Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan.

There has been a lot of publisher’s hype surrounding this novel, and as far as I can see, it is all justified. I think that this was one of the best novels I have read for a long time. It reminded me at times of John Lanchester’s Capital (another favourite of mine).

The principal figure is Campbell Flynn, an academic art critic whose recent biography of Vermeer has drawn considerable critical acclaim and unusual commercial success. Gratifying though this is, Flynn is in need of a far greater economic upturn. To this end, and in a marked divergence from his previous works, he has written a self-help book, His publishers assure him that the book is likely to be a huge success. He is anxious, however, to conceal his identity as the writer, and, by chance, meets a successful actor who has just concluded a long run in a highly popular television series. The actor is persuaded to be ‘the face’ of the book, and in exchange for one third of the royalties, agree to undertake all the promotional activities including media interviews and book-signing events.

In the meantime, Flynn finds himself becoming more closely involved with one of his students, Milo Mangasha. Milo is half Ethiopian, half Irish, and has been taking one of Flynn’s courses as a subsidiary subject while pursuing his computer engineering degree. Milo introduces Flynn to radical new schools of thought, which push the older man in new intellectual and political directions. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of awkward strands from Flynn’s family life rapidly unravelling.

There are far too many subplots to capture in a review or synopsis, but they are all interwoven with great dexterity, many of them centring on Caledonian Road, a long thoroughfare extending from Kings Cross through Islington and up towards Highbury. As it happens, I know the Caledonian Road very well, having driven along it daily for many years as part of my regular commuting journey to Westminster. O’Hagan captures it marvellously, in its unusual blend of pockets of great opulence alongside others of deep deprivation.

The book features a huge cast of characters – in fact, the author offers a list of principal figures at the start of the book with more than sixty names – but they interact effectively. All strata of society feature, from hereditary peers, minor aristocracy, Russian oligarchs, students and rival street gangs. This is a rich literary feast, and one I am sure I will be revisiting shortly.

41. Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz.

Anthony Horowitz must be one of our most prolific current authors, seemingly able to write novels, plays and television scripts in huge numbers, without ever compromising quality. This latest book is another in the highly entertaining series featuring jaded former policeman Daniel Hawthorne and the author himself, as the former’s (frequently reluctant) sidekick.

This time around, Horowitz tweaks the format slightly, and revisits an old case that Hawthorne had investigated several years ago, on that occasion assisted by a different sidekick. The plot centres on a gated community of properties in Richmond, in southwest London. One of the residents, with whom all the other residents had had occasion to row shortly beforehand, is murdered, shot through the neck by a crossbow bolt. While all the neighbours are initially considered to be suspects, one come to the fore as the owner of the crossbow that had been used. This suspicion seems to have been vindicated when he apparently commits suicide. The case is closed.

Several years later, Horowitz is persuaded to look at the case more closely, and explores it further, although this time it is Hawthorne who is reluctant to delve more deeply.

This is another well crafted and enjoyable novel, full of twists, and I didn’t spot the killer.

42. Divine Justice by David Baldacci.

This is the fourth book in David Baldacci’s Camel Club series, and follows on very soon after the resolution of its predecessor volume, Stone Cold. Following the shooting of Carter Gray, former director of the CIA, Camel Club leader, Oliver Stone, is on the run. Not wanting to cause any additional disruption to the lives of his friends, Stone disappears.

Following a series of unforeseeable mishaps, Stone finds himself in Divine, a small town in West Virginia. The town is in decline, and there are only two local employers of any size. One is the coal industry, although the extraction of coal from the mountainous area offers only a grim and highly dangerous life. The other is the nearby Federal ‘super prison’ which contains hundreds of extremely dangerous convicts, most of whom have been shipped there after proving too dangerous to be incarcerated within more conventional jails.

Stone finds that life in this remote town seems almost as dangerous as he had found it in Washington DC. Wherever he goes he seems to find himself having to intervene in vicious fights. Meanwhile, he is being hunted down by Joe Knox, one of the CIA’s most efficient agents who has been tasked with killing Stone, rather than merely arresting him.

This is all fairly standard Camel Club fare, and Baldacci keeps the tension high. At times the book almost seemed like a modern version of a Clint Eastwood western (possibly High Plains Drifter), in which a solitary outlawed man wanders into a town beset with woes, and strives to redeem it. Baldacci’s writing style suits the content – there is no flowery prose, just a strong gripping tale, told without distraction.

43. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin.

Some fictional coppers seem to have Peter Pan qualities, continually investigating and solving serious crimes without ever getting older. For instance, Chief Inspector Wexford and Superintendent Dalziel emerged fully formed from their respective creators' brows and made their first appearance already adorned with high rank.

When creating his thrawn protagonist, Ian Rankin chose a more realistic approach, and we have seen John Rebus age in real time, becoming increasingly cantankerous and inimical to his superiors' authority. As this twentieth Rebus novel opens, he has finally finished work and left the police force. Even his cold case work, which had offered a slight reprieve from the looming threat of being left entirely to his own devices, has now dried up, and he is, officially, retired.

Crime, of course, continues in Edinburgh unabated, and as the novel opens Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, for so long Rebus's protégée (whether she liked it or not), is part of the team investigating the murder in his own house of David Minton. This is a high profile case drawing attention from the local and national press as well as politicians, senior officers and the judiciary because David Minton was also known as Lord Minton, former Lord Advocate of Scotland, and one of the most senior prosecutors of his generation.

The attack on Lord Minton had been brutal and protracted, leading investigators to consider whether the murder represented revenge for the outcome of one of his cases. However, shortly afterwards a local retired businessman is shot at, also in his own home. Always interested whenever firearms are concerned, the police's attention is additionally piqued because the retired businessman in question is one Morris Gerald Cafferty, who as 'Big Ger', has dominated organised crime in the capital for the last few decades. Having been alerted to the gunshot by a neighbour, the police find that Cafferty won't allow them into his house, and he will only agree to talk to John Rebus, his long-time adversary.

Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, formerly of 'the Complaints' (the internal investigation department) but now returned to mainstream policing, has been asked to act as liaison with a special surveillance team over in Edinburgh from Glasgow. They are watching a Glasgow gang boss who they suspect is wanting to establish a toehold in the capital.

Rankin's principal characters are now well-established, developed over the years and resonate with authenticity and credibility. There is, as with many of Rankin's books, a strong undercurrent of melancholy. Different characters make bleak jokes throughout the book, though there is never any hint that any of them might be taking much pleasure in life. Clarke now seems slightly world-weary, and after years of disapproving of Rebus's prodigious alcohol intake, might now be drinking rather too much herself. Fox is slightly lost, struggling to work his way back into the police fold after his years in the leper colony of Complaints. Rebus, like Sir Bedivere at the end of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King', sees the days darken around him, and the years ...

Rankin manages the separate plot strands as capably as ever. The story rattles along and even twenty pages from the end there is little indication of how the various subplots will be resolved, and as always, the city of Edinburgh looms throughout the story, like a character in its own right. A very worthy addition to the Rebus canon.

>60 Eyejaybee:
Does Stauffer mention the strong influence of Byron on the Bronte sisters. Like you I don't know much about him, but his darker side could have helped create the detestable Heathcliff.

Certainly taking a book bullet on Caledonian Road.

>65 scunliffe: Stauffer doesn’t really develop that aspect. Early on he describes an anecdote from Moore’s biography of a Byron in which he overhears a woman whom he loved making a slighting comment about him. Stauffer suggests that this might have inspired the similar scene in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff overhears Cathy’s rejection of him.

44. Hell's Corner by David Baldacci.

This is the final volume of David Baldacci’s very entertaining Camel Club series of novels. As with each of the previous instalments, it picks up well straight after the conclusion of the previous book.

Oliver Stone has been cleared of charges pending from his previous escapades, and is effectively recruited back into government service, at the behest and direct command of no lesser a personage than the President. An operation has arisen that requires his own p
particular brand of skills, and no one else seems even vaguely suitable.

However, before he can commence his preparations, he is overtaken by events in the most direct manner when a bomb is detonated in Lafayette park, across the road from the White House. As it happens, Stone is on hand and sees the explosion and its immediate aftermath. Once again, he finds himself plunged into a frantic investigation in which the multiple agencies of the American intelligence and security community seem to be vying with each other. On this occasion he also finds himself working alongside an officer from Britain’s MI6. She is almost as resourceful and capable as Stone himself. I did occasionally feel, however, that the efforts to emphasise her Britishness made her sound like a modern day rendering of Dick van Dyke’s cockney chimney sweep. She didn’t actually say, ‘Cor blimey, guvnor, strike a light’, but she came quite close.

Until I came across David Baldacci’s books more or less by chance earlier this year, it had been a long time since I had made a habit of reading this sort of thriller. I am glad I rediscovered how much fun they can offer. Baldacci has a habit of pitching his readers immediately into the action, and however outlandish the story might be, he makes suspension of disbelief very easy.

45. The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett.

Like her previous novel, The Appeal, this book is a triumph, and highly entertaining. It is presented as a series of documents, featuring emails, WhatsApp exchanges and SMS messages from a number of characters, all of whom have been involved in the events surrounding the production of a community pantomime by the amateur dramatic society in the small town of Lockwood.

As with the earlier book, a bundle of papers is delivered to two young paralegals in a firm of solicitors, and they are invited to study them with no prior knowledge of the case or its context, and see what conclusions they come to.

The plot revolves around the actions and jealousies found among the members of the Lockwood Amateur Dramatic Society. The correspondence is cleverly presented – we don’t always see both sides of an exchange, and all sorts of sub stories emerge.

The characterisation is great, too. All in all, this works wonderfully – far more effectively than my clumsy synopsis might suggest - , and all sorts of subplots and strained relationships emerge. When I first encountered the book, I had my doubts about the format, wondering whether it might simply be gimmicky. That could not be further from the truth. The drip feed of information, like an old fashioned epistolatory novel, works excellently.

Janice Hallett manages the plot adeptly, too, and I lost count of the unexpected twists and turns, all of them entirely plausible.

46. Who Dares Wins: Britain 1979-1982 by Dominic Sandbrook.8

Dominic Sandbrook continues his vast history of Great Britain from the 1960s up to the present day. This is the fifth immense volume (weighing in at almost a thousand pages) and extends from Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory in May 1979 until the victorious conclusion of the Falklands War in 1982.

I should say straight away that I am a huge fan of Dominic Sandbrook, and feel that this is his finest book yet, although I recognise that that might simply reflect my greater familiarity with, and recollection of, the events about which he writes. Where he excels is in drawing together, without any semblance of artifice, so many different strands of life. He gives a detailed account of the political issues dominating day to day life, but also sheds light on prevailing trends in entertainment, literature and music, as well as changing aspects to domestic life.

A thousand pages for just three years might seem excessive, but those three years saw almost seismic shifts in British life. Political commentators had expected Prime Minister James Callaghan to call an election during late summer or autumn 1978, but he chose instead to let his tenure run for full term. That proved to be a fatal misjudgement. Not only was he beset by what came to be known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’, with public service unions bringing many elements of daily life to a standstill through concerted industrial action, exacerbated by a particularly harsh winter, but he fell foul of Scottish and Welsh Nationalists.

Callaghan had inherited No. 10 from his predecessor, Harold Wilson, who had stepped down from the premiership in 1976 in response (as we now know, although it was never acknowledged at the time) to signs of the early onset of dementia. Callaghan was a benign and popular figure, and is the only person to have held any four great offices of state (Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary). He is, unfortunately, now generally remembered for having presided over the Winter of Discontent, and for losing the parliamentary confidence vote which led to the May election that brought Mrs Thatcher to power. Wilson had secured a very small majority in the autumn election in 1974, but that had gradually been eroded throughout the course of the parliament, leaving Callaghan dependent upon the support of the small Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru cohorts within the House.

It is always tempting (if pointless) to speculate about the ‘What if?’ moments of history. If Callaghan had gone to the country in autumn 1978, as most of the pundits anticipated, would he have won? If so, the whole course of British political history would have been completely different. Mrs Thatcher would almost certainly have been deposed as Conservative leader, perhaps to be replaced by a rival of more moderate views.

It was not just the Winter of Discontent that led to Callaghan’s defeat. On 1 March 1979 voters in both Wales and Scotland voted in respective referenda about the issue of devolution of power, with a view to establishing their own parliaments. A majority of those voting in Scotland did indeed opt for a Scottish parliament. They did not, however, do so in sufficient numbers to meet the additional criterion insisted upon by Callaghan’s Westminster government, that, as well as a majority of votes actually cast, at least forty per cent of the total electorate in each country had to support devolution. On a snowy and painfully cold day, overall turnout in Scotland was too low for the vote to cross that hurdle, and the bid for independence failed. The SNP and Plaid Cymru immediately withdrew their support for Callaghan’s government, rendering it only a matter of time before it succumbed to a vote of confidence. ‘Like turkeys voting for Christmas’, was Callaghan’s verdict, before he bowed to the inevitable and, having lost a crucial confidence vote, fell back upon the whim of the electorate.

Mrs Thatcher is one of the most divisive figures in British political history, but one who is now generally the subject of rampant vituperation. Having just turned sixteen, I was too young to vote in the 1979 election, but contrary to the revisionist view prevalent today, I remember that there was a feeling almost of euphoria when Mrs Thatcher emerged victorious from that election. This was, it is true, more a feeling that change … any change … had to be welcome. Things had been so relentlessly grim over the preceding seven or eight months that any sort of new start was welcome. Of course, no-one would have believed in May 1979 that the Conservatives would remain in power for the next eighteen years, and, as if to prove Santayana’s adage about the cyclical nature of history, there was the same sense of euphoria or relief when Tony Blair’s New Labour finally ousted them.

The Falklands War proved to be the pivotal moment in Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. Indeed, if Argentina had not invaded the Falkland Islands, it is unlikely that she would have secured even a second term, far less a third. The British economy plummeted during her first years as Prime Minister, and unemployment soared, extending beyond three million. Of course, this was particularly ironic given the success of the Conservatives’ election campaign, a key element of which had been billboards showing huge queues outside a Job Centre with the slogan, ‘Labour isn’t working’. Even senior figures within her own party were starting to challenge her approach. During the opening years of her premiership, Britain saw vicious riots spreading throughout the country, in places as far apart as Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Cardiff.

Sandbrook captures all of this and far more, and renders it all very accessibly, and offers some very wry observations along the way.

47. A Study in Death by Iain McDowall.

This was a strange novel, and notably dissatisfying.

Ambitious academic Dr Roger Harvey is found dead in his apartment, having been beaten about the head. There are no readily discernible motives, and very few clues. The police investigation is led by DCI Jacobson and DS Kerr.

Presumably intending to make them ‘interesting’ characters, Iain McDowall bestows angst-ridden personalities on both of them. Sadly this move fails, and serves only to render them, and the book as a whole, very tedious. Not one character betrays any vaguely empathetic trait found myself steeped in apathy with regard to the resolution of the mystery.

This is not a series that I will be returning too. Apart from any other consideration, the prose was of a flatness and deadness that suggested to me that the author had been even less interested in the story than I was.

>70 Eyejaybee: Thanks to your earlier review of Sandbrook #4, I have just started #1 Never Had it so Good. I am old enough to remember being aware of the 1956 Suez crisis, I was 10 at the time, but had no idea what the crisis was about other than the Suez Canal. Now I know, what a comeuppance for Eden, believing he could pull off such a move without consulting the U.S. first. The result could be a dictionary definition of hubris.

>72 scunliffe:. I hope you enjoy it. I hadn’t appreciated before I read Never Had It So Good the extent to which Anthony Eden had been so widely viewed as the Golden Boy of British politics.

48. Ten Seconds by Robert Gold.

Ben Harper is back, once again confronted with a bizarre mystery arising from what would normally appear to be the very quiet West London suburb of Haddley. This time the crime is an abduction, and the victim is Madeliene, Ben’s boss and editor of a leading online news site. As it happens, Ben had been with Madeleine immediately before her abduction, having joined with her and her father to celebrate the latter’s birthday. She is whisked off in her car, unaware that her regular driver has himself been attacked, and replaced by the kidnapper.

Ben and Madeleine’s father then find themselves racing around the country, struggling to pick up clues to her whereabouts. It soon transpires that her abduction is related to a story that she had covered years ago, and which led to the conviction and imprisonment of a young man who had committed a gruesome murder in Haddley.

Robert Gold writes in a fluid style that sucks the reader in. Ben is a very engaging character: he has had more than his share of traumatic experiences himself, and these have made him empathetic. Other characters are very plausible too, not least Dani Cash, a Detective Sergeant based in the local police station, and her colleagues on the Force.

This is a quirky and light-hearted series, but no less rewarding for that.

49. A Decent Interval by Simon Brett.

Charles Paris is back! After a break of several years during which he has concentrated on his Fethering series of novels (with alliterative titles such as The Body on the Beach and Murder in the Museum), Simon Brett returned to Charles Paris, the down-at-heel and rather mediocre journeyman actor who is, to my mind, his finest creation.

In this outing Charles lands a part (well, two parts, actually) in a production of Hamlet which is scheduled for a tour of provincial theatres around England before a hopefully triumphant run in London's West End. Charles is gratified to have the roles of The Ghost and the First Gravedigger, and is looking forward to an enjoyable spell of work. The title role is, however, to be taken by Jared Root, recent winner of a reality TV singing competition (clearly modelled on the X Factor) while Ophelia is to be played by Katrina Selsey who had landed the part as her prize for winning a similar television competition.

It soon becomes clear that Jared Root can't act at all, while Katrina Selsey has delusions of stardom way beyond her as yet untested talent. Just before the opening night in Marlborough, first stop on the provincial run of the production, part of the stage set falls down, seriously wounding Root. Shortly afterwards, Katrina Selsey dies under strange circumstances. Charles decides to investigate.

The Charles Paris novels are always amusing, filled with Brett's insight into the trials and tribulations of an actor's life (exacerbated by Charles's relentless drinking). This latest in the series is well up to standard, and I found it most enjoyable.

>69 Eyejaybee: I also enjoyed The Appeal, despite it breaking one of the commandments of detective fiction by keeping information secret not just from the reader but from the investigators. I have added The Christmas Appeal to my wish list and am prepared to be misled.

50. Rather be the Devil by Ian Rankin

John Rebus is proving to be one of the most durable of fictional crime fighters. Now retired not just from Lothian and Borders police but also from the cold case team that he had joined after leaving the mainstream force, he has a lot of time on his hands. He also has plenty on his mind since, as the novel opens, he is waiting for the results of a biopsy taken after doctors discovered a shadow on his lung. As a consequence of this, while keeping his concerns to himself, he has finally given up smoking, rendering him even more thrawn than ever.

Meanwhile, his former would-be adversary turned grudging friend, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, previously local head of the Professional Standards Division, has been transferred to the elite Police Scotland Crime Squad based at Gartcosh near Glasgow. Siobhan Clarke, long time work partner of Rebus (and fleetingly romantic partner of Fox) is still in Edinburgh, slightly resentful of the opportunity afforded Fox, and increasingly concerned about Rebus’s health.

Fox is commissioned to investigate Edinburgh ‘businessman’ Darryl Christie, another former adversary of Rebus, Fox and Clarke, who is suspected of involvement in organised money laundering through the electronic gambling machines in the chain of betting shops that he owns. Meanwhile, a suspected associate of Christie, financial adviser Anthony Brough, grandson of the former owner of Brough’s private bank, has gone missing. Nearly forty years earlier Brough’s father had been a suspect in a murder scandal that ensnared much of Edinburgh’s top society. And then, back in the present, Christie is found severely beaten up in his own garden.

What follows in an intricately woven story that shifts between the past and present as Rebus and Co struggle to unravel a financial morass mired against a background of underworld alliances and gang conflicts. Of course, Rebus’s sworn enemy, Maurice Gerald Cafferty is there to muddy the waters with his own brand of Mephistophelean woe, too.

Rankin always offers robust and plausible plots, which benefit from the use of genuine locations. This time around, however, I felt that the principal charades lacked their customary solidity. There was a coarseness about Rebus in this book that had been absent, or more deeply hidden in previous volumes in the series. Clarke, too, lacks some of her edge, although who could blame her for lacking some of her brio after years of bailing Rebus out of the mire. Even with these slight cavils, this is still an entertaining and enjoyable book, and I am confident that the series could sustain several more volumes yet.

51. Double Jeopardy by Colin Forbes.

This was absolute rubbish, and served to show how far the thriller has evolved in the last few decades.

The plot was fatuous, and the characters were trite and pandered to the most inane stereotypes. Even allowing for the fact that the book was published more than forty years ago, the sexism was painful to behold, with no cliché knowingly overlooked. Forbes’s characters made the James Bond of Ian Fleming'snovels seem almost like a woke warrior.

>78 Eyejaybee: Thank you for this wonderfully scathing review. Made me laugh.

>79 pamelad: My library does not have this book. I found one by him and have it on hold. Just had to read (or try) to read one by him.

>80 jbegab: >79 pamelad: Apparently ‘Colin Forbes’ was just one of several pseudonyms that were used by Raymond Harold Sawkins. He was very popular throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

52. Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan.

I recently read Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Caledonian Road¸ which I found marvellous, and was intrigued to read more by him. This was also a well-written book, and gave a moving insight into the nature and demands of male friendship, stretching from early adulthood towards later life.

I presume that O’Hagan is a little younger than me – I recognised a lot of the cultural references (especially the musical ones), although they fell slightly outwith my primary comfort zone. Still, the book prompted a lot of memories of my own youth, grappling to come to terms with the idea of working fulltime after a relatively indolent existence at school and university, while the most important issues in life were how Leicester City were faring, and whether I could afford the latest must-have rock album. O’Hagan captures all of that with great precision, and also brings home the realisation, that comes only very slowly to young men (and probably young women, too) that we are only immortal for a limited period

53. Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie.

I think it must be not much short of fifty years since I first read this novel. I went through a phase of reading Agatha Christie almost obsessively in early adolescence, one after another with no other books in between. As a consequence, a lot of the less well-known ones have merged together in my mind, and I had very little recollection of this one.

I also realise now that I took very little notice of Ms Christie’s style, completely overlooking some of her social observations, and the extreme brutality of some of the characters’ attitudes. For instance, we tend to think of Miss Marple as a rather dotty, gentle old lady, but in the books that feature her she actually comes across as a steely character, with a sharp appetite for justice, however it might be rendered. In this book (which doesn’t feature one of Christie’s regular sleuths), one of the victims is a young boy about whom everyone is agreed that the village is a better place without him.

The story opens with a chance encounter on a train between Luke Fitzwilliam, who has just returned to the United Kingdom having retired from a career as a policeman out in the Far East, and Miss Pinkerton, an elderly lady with a desire for earnest conversation. Miss Pinkerton is on her way to London to visit Scotland Yard, to seek advice and help over a series of deaths that have occurred in the village where she lives. She is convinced that they were murders, and that she knows who is responsible. They part at the station, and Luke dismisses her as an entertaining but rather dotty travelling companion, and expects never to hear any more about her. However, by chance he reads an account of a hit and run incident outside Scotland yard in which it transpires that Miss Pinkerton had been the fatally wounded victim. Being at a loose end, with little better to do, Luke decides to visit the village, and investigate further.

I enjoyed rereading this, and for once actually guessed the murderer. I wouldn’t rank it in the forefront of Christie’s canon, but it was well constructed, and the plot was plausible

54. Stagestruck by Peter Lovesey

This was not one of the stronger novels in this series. Indeed, if this had been the first of the Peter Diamond novels that I had read, I would not have bothered reading any others in the series, and would have missed out on some great books.

The plot surrounds a production of I Am A Camera at the Bath Playhouse, starring a former popstar who was trying to break into the acting world. She suffers a bizarre injury just before her entrance on the night of the premiere, and the performance has to be suspended.

I felt that Lovesey departed from his normal approach, and concentrated too much on some unusual, and overly theatrical characters, and took his eye off the ball, letting the plot suffer from his inattention.

55. Memory Man by David Baldacci.

Amos Decker is an unusual man. In his early twenties, he had suffered a brutal tackle during an American football game which left him with severe concussion, and led to him giving up the game permanently. It also left him with a perfect memory, so perfect that he literally never forgets anything. This had been especially valuable during his subsequent career as a police officer, and then detective.

About sixteen months before the novel opens, Decker had returned home from work one night to find that his wife and their child had been murdered. After that his life, understandably, fell apart, and found himself jobless and homeless. Since then, he has started to recoup some order in his life, and he now works as a private detective, just about managing to keep himself afloat. His life is thrown back into disarray when his former partner from his time on the police force comes looking for him to let him know that someone has confessed to the murder of his family. Decker makes his way to the police station, hoping to find out more. Meanwhile, a gunman opens fire in a local school, killing various pupils and members of staff.

There is a lot going on in this story, but it all hangs together coherently. I thought that Baldacci handled the oddities of Decker’s enhanced, or at least unusual;, cognitive powers very capably, and the story was very gripping.

56. In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin.

John Rebus may eventually have retired, after returning to work on the Cold Case Team, but he has not noticeably mellowed at all. Ian Rankin originally made a point of ageing his curmudgeonly protagonist in real time, taking him from being forty years old on his first appearance in Knots and Crosses in 1987 to his initial (and largely enforced) retirement from the police force at the age of sixty in 2007, as detailed in Exit Music. Since then, however, Rankin seems to have allowed the ageing process to slow down, and Rebus seems still to be in his mid-sixties as this new novel opens. He has, however, been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD – as one character remarks, trust him to have a condition with ‘COP’ in its name), and has finally (almost unimaginably) given up smoking.

Of course, retirement does not stop him from taking an interest in the doings of his former colleagues. When an old corpse is recovered from a car that had been dumped in Poretoun Woods, on the fringes of the capital, he is particularly intrigued, and is quick to contact his former protégée Siobhan Clarke, now herself a Detective Inspector. The dead person is eventually identified as a private investigator who had disappeared twelve years ago. At that time, he had been retained by a film producer to investigate the affairs of a local property magnate with whom the producer was competing in a bid to buy Poretoun Woods.

At the time of the disappearance the investigator’s family had lodged numerous complaints against the police, ranging from accusations of incompetence and apathy through to outright corruption. Because of that, the discovery of the corpse draws additional public interest beyond what might have been expected, and the investigator’s family whips up a media storm to demand an inquiry. We soon learn that Rebus himself had worked on the original investigation, with an assortment of incompetent colleagues who each had their own secret vice to hide. Being under a cloud was, of course, Rebus’s default setting, but back in the present day, Siobhan Clarke has also had her own brush with disciplinary action. If not exactly vindicated, she has at least emerged with the equivalent of a ‘not proven’ verdict, but the two officers who investigated her seem also to loom large over the present case, not least because they too had been involved in the original investigation twelve years ago.

Rankin has always been dextrous at maintaining several storylines, but this novel has his most complex plot yet. Indeed, perhaps the ageing process has not been as gentle with me in recent years as it has with Rebus, because I did wonder at times whether Rankin was making it as interlaced as possible simply for the sake of it. All the customary features are present – Rebus is as ‘thrawn’ as ever although perhaps Siobhan Clarke is a little less patient than in the past. Rebus’s bête noir, Morris Gerald “Big Ger” Cafferty is present, as beguiling and menacing as ever, and relative new boy, Malcolm Fox (formerly of the Complaints Division) is there too.

The mixture works, although I wonder how many more novels Rankin can wring from these ingredients before the quality starts to fall away. I can think of several writers of long detective novel series that outlived their sell by dates - Peter Robinson and Patricia Cornwell being clear examples to my mind of writers whom I previously admired but whose recent books have lurched from one embarrassment to another, eroding their former reputation a little further with each new outing. Still, I consider that Rankin is a far better writer than either of them, even at their best, so I hope he has sufficient insight to know when he ought to bring down the curtain

It seems that the most recent volume A Heart Full of Headstones does bring down the curtain. I hope so because this last once really stretches credulity by the amount Rebus interferes with ongoing police investigations.

57. A Deadly Habit by Simon Brett.

Simon Brett’s journeyman actor Charles Paris makes a very welcome return.

Charles has never ascended to the heights of his profession, and periods of gainful employment have tended to be the exception rather than the rule. His lack of professional success and achievement has been mirrored in his personal life, and now, nearing sixty (Simon Brett has not followed the approach of writers such as Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly in letting their protagonists age in real time, and Charles has been in his fifties ever since the publication of the earliest novels in the series back in the late 1970s), he is living alone in his bedsit near Paddington, and drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol.

Things may be looking up on one front as Frances, his never-quite-divorced wife seems amenable to a rapprochement as they approach their sixties, but she has insisted that Charles needs to stop drinking. Predictably for anyone familiar with the series, Charles greets this terrifying prospect by getting hideously drunk.

As the novel opens, Charles is in the unusual position of having some lucrative work lined up, and not just any old role. He has been selected for a part in a new play which is set for a three-month run in the West End, and did not even have to audition. The new play stars Julian Glover, an actor of similar age but markedly different career profile to Charles. Indeed, they had worked together more than thirty years ago in a repertory theatre in Dorset, when they had between them played Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (although at this remove neither could remember which of them they each played). Since then, Glover had risen in the profession, starring in several films and securing a leading part in a blockbuster television series in the Game of Thrones genre. For reasons never made clear, Glover had recommended Charles for one of the minor parts in this play.

Rehearsals begin, and the company seems to be coming together fairly well, with no major rifts or friction. As usual, Charles’s first concern is to sort out prospective drinking partners, and despite his hopes of continued rapprochement with Frances, he makes his habitual prospective philanderer’s assessment of the female members of the cast and crew. All is going well until one night towards the end of the rehearsal period, the female lead is found dead at the foot of a staircase, with no indication of whether she had fallen or been pushed. Shortly afterwards, the theatre’s ageing alcoholic doorman is also found dead in a seedy private drinking club. Charles once more finds himself in a theatre company which contains a murderer.

Brett is very accomplished at developing engrossing plots, and adroitly judges the balance between suspense and humour. Charles is as engaging a character as ever, and this book adds another dimension to its predecessors with the reader rooting for Charles to succeed in his struggles over drinking.

All in all, this was very entertaining.

58. The Last Mile by David Baldacci.

This marked the return of Amos Decker, the protagonist of Memory Man who has hyperthymesia (almost perfect memory recall) following a hard tackle during an American football game some twenty years previously.

This story picks up very shortly after the end of Memory Man, and Decker has been informally recruited into a special cold case review team of the FBI. The team had planned to meet to discuss which case to take on. However, en route to the meeting, Decker had chanced to hear about an almost literally last-minute reprieve for Melvin Mars, who had been scheduled for execution for the murder of his parents twenty years earlier. Shortly before he was due to enter the execution chamber, a convict hundreds of miles away had confessed to that murder, and had provided sufficient details about the killings to convince the authorities of his guilt. Decker convinces his FBI Team to take on an investigation of this case instead.

As usual with Baldacci’s books, the plot is sinuous and full of surprises, and the characters are plausible. Decker emerges as a very strong character, although Baldacci is careful to pepper him with faults and frailties, maintaining his credibility.

59. A Game of Lies by Clare Mackintosh.

Detective Constable Ffion Morgan was a welcome addition to the crime fiction canon following her debut in The Last Party, and makes a welcome return here. She is still living in Cwn Coed, the village in North Wales where she had grown up. Cwn Coed is situated very near the border with England, with local jurisdictions fiercely asserted by the neighbouring police forces.

A new reality television programme, Exposure, is being filmed near the village, and one of the local residents is a contestant. The participants had applied in the expectation that the show would be a test of their physical resilience as they competed to survive in trying conditions, but the producer has a surprise in store for them. He has unearthed damaging secrets about each of them, to be divulged as individual competitors are expelled, with only the eventual winner being able to keep theirs hidden. The revelation of this cruel twist sends viewing figures rocketing, but instils real terror among the contestants. All of them threaten to walk out, until Miles, the producer and creator of the show, points out that they have all signed contracts, with sufficiently robust but unread small print that means they are all trapped in the show.

It is no great surprise, then, when Miles is found dead, having been killed at his mixing desk. Suspects abound – Miles has not just alienated all the contestants but also his presenter, who feels her nascent television reputation will be compromised by association with such a cruel show, his other staff, whom her has regularly humiliated, and local traders whom he has been tardy to pay.

Clare Mackintosh writes very engagingly, and I was drawn into this novel immediately. Ffion is a great character – conscientious in her pursuit of a murderer, although far from rigorous in her relationship with formal protocol. She also has a great fund of frequently injudicious but also very funny responses to people who annoy her. The plot is robust and highly plausible, too.

60. The Cleaner by Mark Dawson.

This could so easily have been a very good novel, but sadly fell short.

The basic premise is that John Milton, until recently employed as a fixer (for which read assassin) by MI6 has had a crisis of confidence. On his last hit for the organisation, in a remote corner of France, he had duly despatched his main targets, along with a gendarme who had the misfortune to intrude upon the scene by chance, but was prevented by hitherto unprecedented qualms from killing the victims’ young child, who was, as a consequence, left as a potential witness to what had happened. Such a demonstration of conscience was not what he was paid for, and he found himself suspended without pay while his employers considered what should be done with him.

As he left the department’s offices he has a strange encounter on the underground system, which leads to him moving temporarily to a housing estate in one of the more disadvantaged areas of east London, where gang culture is taking control.

Unfortunately, I found the writer’s half-hearted attempts to convey urban decay and rampant deprivation rather off-putting, as was the unrelenting woodenness of Milton as a character. There were times when he struggled even to become two-dimensional, and ascension to the third was far beyond him.

>91 Eyejaybee: LOL- "he struggled even to become two-dimensional, and ascension to the third was far beyond him."

>90 Eyejaybee: I'm amused by your dead-pan review of The Last Man. Perhaps hyperthymesia is more common than I realised, particularly after a hard tackle. >91 Eyejaybee: A robust and plausible plot would be a relief? Putting it on the wish list.

61. The Cinderella Killer by Simon Brett.

Throughout the seventeen or eighteen previous novels in this series, Charles Paris's acting career has been as diverse as it has been unsuccessful. Alongside a raft of different theatrical roles (including Shakespearean tragedy and comedy), he has featured in television sitcoms, vintage murder mystery series, corporate PR videos and game shows. He even sank to the nadir of representing a missing businessman in a 'Crimewatch'-type reconstruction in 'A Reconstructed Corpse'.

One of the few genres that hadn't featured in the series so far was pantomime, but, as is evident from the title, its turn has come (Oh, no, it hasn't!). Charles finds himself as one of the Broker's Men in the production being mounted at Eastbourne. The star of the production is Kenny Polizzi, an American actor who had played the lead role in an immensely successful comedy programme that had run for sixteen seasons and been syndicated all around the world.

Kenny has a reputation for having been a hellraiser in his youth, with rampant rumours of alcoholism and substance abuse. He is also going through a particularly vitriolic divorce from Lilith, his third wife who is also an established star across the Atlantic, and has welcomed the opportunity to escape some of the celebrity limelight by spending a couple of months working in Britain. He will be playing Baron Hardup.

Other cast members include the current star of a major UK soap opera as Cinderella, and an actor from a long running television drama (branded a few years ago as 'TV's Mr Sex' by the tabloids) playing Buttons. Right from the start, these two have been griping about which of them should have second billing, and their animosity is starting to pollute the rest of the company.

This is all vintage Simon Brett territory, and he handles the plot as expertly as usual. He has that happy skill of being able to weave together a light-hearted context with a soundly constructed plot, and this book shows him in mid-season form, driving the ball firmly to the boundary with every shot. Very entertaining, engaging and amusing.

62. No Way Out: Brexit: From Boris to the Backstop by Tim Shipman.*.

It is now about eight years since the referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the European Union. The decision to leave has probably been the single most significant political issue in Britain throughout my lifetime, and even though it is now a few years since the final departure, its reverberations are still being felt.

From the outside it might seem simply to have been a fairly straightforward binary option, with followers of either side campaigning against adherents of the other. Oh, if only it had been that straightforward! This is the third volume in Tim Shipman’s comprehensive, and admirably non-partisan account of the Brexit story – he had initially intended that three would be enough, but that was before the unfolding pantomime or farce of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, which have merited a separate volume of their own, to be published shortly.

This third instalment follows the ups and downs … well, let’s be serious, the downs and further downs of Theresa May’s attempts to bring Brexit to fruition, and the stalemate that befell parliament. I worked in Whitehall throughout the period covered in the book, and I was simultaneously struck by how much I recalled in pellucid detail … and how much I had forgotten (although it is possible that that reflects the subconscious activation of mental health defence mechanisms). Certainly, reading it again brought back traumatic memories of ‘Meaningful Votes’ and the sheer intransigence and perverseness of characters on either side of the issue. I do remember wondering at the time how Theresa May managed to keep going, and still turn up at Parliament for what seemed to become a daily mauling. Whatever one thinks of her views, her resilience and dignity under unprecedented pressure were phenomenal.

She did seem to have a considerable knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I remember being in a high level meeting with the Senior Leadership Team of the Department for Education in April 2017 when the news came through that she had called a sudden general election. At that time, her party was riding high in the polls from the local council elections that were imminent around much of the country, and she thought it might be a good opportunity to capitalise on that, and enhance her parliamentary majority. The Opposition at that time was led by Jeremy Corbyn, and his campaign for the local elections had started with a series of ‘car crash’ interviews by him and some of his senior colleagues within the party. What May failed to take into account were the fact that over the last few days, Corbyn and his colleagues had actually improved their campaigning performance, and the fact that the local election schedule meant that the parliamentary elections would have to be deferred longer than usual. I think that campaign exhaustion set in with the public, who showed little appetite for, or interest in, an elongated campaign period.

The outcome was disastrous for Theresa May, and when ballots were counted she found that her previous slender parliamentary majority had been eroded. In order to maintain her government she was required to enter into a ‘confidence and supply agreement’ (essentially a coalition) with the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. Having already struggled to secure any practical agreement across Parliament to support her Brexit measures, this left her vulnerable to further dissent within her own party, and pitiless ridicule from the opposition parties facing her. From there on, two years of political stalemate (given the soubriquet ‘Erskine Mayhem’ by one constitution commentator) set in, and the British parliament, hitherto viewed with respect all around the world, descended into farce.

Shipman has drawn on a vast selection of sources, including an impressive journalistic archive and his own (often unattributed) conversations with most of the leading participants. Even though we all know the outcome, the book is gripping throughout, presented almost like a Shakespearean tragedy. At times hilarious, there are also episodes that provoke fury at the utter incompetence of leading figures on both sides of the issue, who frequently displayed emotional illiteracy or an utter incapacity for empathy.

The bitterness and personal enmity (not to mention the Shakespearean similarities) continued throughout, as manifested in the bizarre machinations within the struggle to secure the Conservative leadership. Machiavelli, Iago and Bosola would have been in their element within that farrago of pledges and sleights of hand, as different attempts to resolve the impasse were bruited and then forsaken.

The ‘what if’ counterfactual novel has become very popular over recent years, with works such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland or the late Philip Roth’s the Plot Against America exploring alternative historical outcomes. I feel sure that within a few years we will start seeing novels considering alternative outcomes of the Brexit.

Tim Shipman’s book is both informative and entertaining, proving once again how much stranger fact can be than fiction. Regardless of the political complexion of the government, I have always believed that it is in everyone’s interest that we have a strong opposition. Shipman makes clear that, following the as yet unhealed internal divisions within the Conservatives following their post-Referendum leadership contest, the Government seemed holed below the waterline, and offered an easy target for Her Majesty’s Opposition. Only there was no Opposition. While the Conservative tore themselves apart following David Cameron’s resignation, they did at least manage to appoint a new leader within a matter of a few weeks. Meanwhile, the Labour Party, having gone through one painful leadership contest that resulted with apparent rank outsider Jeremy Corbyn emerging as runaway winner, chose to plunge itself into a second contest, rendering the same result but with an even bigger margin, although it took several months to do so. All of which makes the Labour resurgence in the 2017 general election such a surprise.

The clear lesson from Shipman’s book is the enduring peril of political hubris. Labour centrists refused to believe that the party could appoint a genuinely socialist leader, while Theresa May failed to acknowledge the possibility that she would not be returned to Downing Street with a Thatcheresque landslide majority. As in a Greek tragedy, in which the oracle has offered its occluded prophesy, both those conceits would be punctured in the most brutal fashion. Unfortunately, amusing though such outcomes and fractured vanities might appear in the abstract, the consequent uncertainly was painful for Britain, and indeed Europe, to live through.

>95 Eyejaybee:
And Britain, from what is have seen in The Economist, is stuck with the consequences like an economic ball and chain.

>96 scunliffe: Well as a loyal civil servant of HM Government, I couldn't possibly comment!

63. Cleavage by Cleo Watson.

Following on from Cleo Watson’s previous novel, Whips, this is another very funny (and extremely explicit) romp through the world of political intrigue. The previous novel followed the machinations within a Conservative government in Westminster that was starting to fall apart owing to internal wrangling and dissension, with scandals (political and sexual) emerging on all sides. Well, let’s be honest, such a scenario probably doesn’t tax the imagination too grievously! The story has moved on, and an election is now imminent.

Cleo Watson has a strong political pedigree after having worked on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 and then served as a senior aide to two British Prime Ministers (Theresa May and Boris Johnson). I am inclined to suggest that the highly scurrilous nature of the book may be rooted more in the latter than the former of those two spells in No. 10.

The various storylines are so sinuous and intertwined that it is difficult to provide a coherent synopsis without straying quite heavily into spoiler territory. As someone who visits parliament a few times each week, I recognised Ms Watson’s descriptions of the locations, if not necessarily the behaviour, very clearly, which added to my enjoyment of the story.

Despite the explicit and uproarious content, this is a well written book, and the characters are developed clearly and strongly.

64. Murder at the Monastery by The Reverend Richard Coles.

I was disappointed with this novel. It is certainly an enjoyable book, but I felt that it did not live up to its predecessors, Murder Before Evensong and, especially, A Death in the Parish. The observation of village life in the early 1980s remains sharp, and there were some amusing cultural references, including one of the characters sporting a Communards badge.

Somehow, though, I felt that Coles was running out of enthusiasm for the project, and that this third episode in the life of Canon Daniel Clement was spread a little too thinly to offer literary nourishment.

>99 Eyejaybee: They can't all be Richard Osman, I guess!

:)

>88 Eyejaybee: On series characters ageing in real time, the first 3 Charles Parris novels were published in the mid 70s and specifically mentioned the month and year when they were set, I think. Charles was 47 in #1, published 50 years ago now!

Interestingly, the more recent BBC Radio 4 adaptations by Jeremy Front somehow slip in some very 21st century changes.

>102 elkiedee: Yes, I like Jeremy Front's radio adaptations, and think that Bill Nighy is good in the role, even though he is very different from how I envisaged Charles Paris when reading the books.

65. A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin.

Time and tide wait for no man, and they have been taking their toll on John Rebus, Ian Rankin’s ‘thrawn’ detective. I admire Rankin’s decision, like Michael Connelly with Hieronymus Bosch, to let his protagonist age in real time. Some prominent detectives (Hercule Poirot, Chief Inspector Wexford and Superintendent Peter Diamond), seem to have been preserved in aspic, plodding on year after year without ever changing.

One advantage of Rankin’s and Connelly’s approach is that it lends a greater verisimilitude, and also allows them greater scope for reference to real world events. The downside is that, sooner or later, they have to retire from the police force, and try to come to terms with retirement.

As this novel opens, Rebus is moving home. He isn’t going far, and is in the same block of flats, but now on the ground floor. Having been a lifelong smoker and drinker, on an almost industrial scale, he has succumbed to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which has meant that he can no longer readily cope with the two flights of stone stairs up to his old flat. He is helped in the move by his former colleague, Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, herself now clearly older than when she was first encountered as a minor character in The Black Book. Rebus will not be alone in his flat, though – he has taken Brillo, the stray dog he acquired a few books ago.

In this book, Rebus spends most of his time away from Edinburgh, summoned up to Wester Ross by a telephone call from Samantha, his largely estranged daughter (flaring additional guilt in Rebus’s already tormented mind when he realises that he had forgotten to tell her that he had moved house). Samantha’s partner, Keith, has gone missing in disturbing circumstances, and she is worried about him. Rebus parks Brillo with Siobhan and coaxes his trusty old Saab up into the desolate far north of Scotland.

Siobhan, meanwhile, has her own new case to investigate, following the murder in Edinburgh of a young Arabian student, who had high society connections. Needless to say, the two investigations eventually intersect, although Rankin manages this deftly, and the reader does not require any suspension of disbelief.

Of course, like his protagonist, Ian Rankin himself is growing older, and he captures Rebus’s changing perspective, and resignation with what life throws at him, very capably. I have driven along a lot of the roads that Rebus travels throughout the far north of Scotland (often in a car of similar vintage to Rebus’s Saab), and Rankin depicts them wonderfully. I know all too well the simultaneous awe at the splendour of the scenery with that gnawing concern at the back of one’s mind about what might happen if your car suddenly broke down.

The grating relationship between Rebus and Samantha is striking, too. Those familiar with the Rebus canon will know that Samantha has been through a lot: kidnapped by a maniac as a young child, knocked down by a hit and run driver, and left struggling through painful physiotherapy before she could be certain she would walk again, and caught in the emotional crossfire between Rebus and his ex-wife. While she calls on Rebus for help, she is still far from welcoming when he arrives, and past hurts contend sharply with current needs.

Rankin always writes well, and all of the Rebus books are entertaining, but I felt that this one rose significantly above its recent predecessors. In fact, I think that this is the best book in the series since Rebus’s initial retirement from the police back in Exit Music. A great success.

66. The Fix by David Baldacci.

Amos Decker, FBI Special Agent and hyperthymesiac, returns for a third outing. The novel opens with a man shooting a woman just outside the FBI’s main building in Washington, and then turning his gun on himself. As it happens, this takes place right in front of Decker himself.

Initial investigation finds no connection between the man and his victim, and the Bureau is at a loss to explain what happened. Decker and his team are dragged into a complex case, unravelling numerous threads that require further exploration.

As with his previous novels, Baldacci is adept at maintaining the reader’s attention. The story moves on at great pace, and while I might now stop and look back with incredulity and pick all sorts of holes in the plot, at the time I was reading it I was utterly gripped.

67. The Mirror and the Road by William Boyd.*

William Boyd must be a serious contender for the title of greatest living British writer. His novels are a major adornment to the body of contemporary literature, and I think he is probably incapable of writing an ugly sentence. Indeed, I expect even his shopping lists or notes to the milkman (not that anyone leaves notes for the milkman anymore – indeed, are there any milkmen now?) are exercises in eloquence.

This book takes the form of transcripts of a series of conversations and Zoom calls between Boyd and Alistair Owen, and encompasses most of his works to date, including his novels, short stories, collections of non-fiction articles, and the numerous television and film screenplays that he has written. These conversations offer a pellucid insight into Boyd’s writing itself, and the way that his novels develop.

I always feel a slight trepidation when embarking upon a book like this, in case the insight it might offer to a writer’s methodology may somehow erode some of the magic. No such fears here – this was fascinating, and has, if anything, enhanced my estimation of Boyd’s work

68. The Man in Black and Other Stories by Elly Griffiths.

I am a big fan of Elly Griffiths, which led me to break my general rule of not reading short stories. I know that many people prefer short stories to novels, and I readily acknowledge the skill deployed by many authors in producing them. They do not, however, appeal to me.

I did, however, enjoy this collection overall. Elly Griffiths has created some fantastic characters. This collection is enjoyable, but maybe one more for the completists.

69, 71 and 80. The Fallen, Redemption, and Walk the Wire by David Baldacci

I must confess to falling lamentably behind with my reviewing of books read so far this year, so will offer a composite note for these three books (volumes 4, 5 and 6) in the Amos Decker series.

I have only recently discovered David Baldacci, and have made rather a feast of his books so far this year. When I was younger I read a huge number of thrillers, but then rather fell out of the habit. Baldacci is a master of the genre, producing fast moving and exciting stories that grab, and then hold, the reader's attention (this reader, anyway), regardless of how fart-fetched the stories might seem when subject to more distant reflection. These three books were all welcome additions to the Decker chronicles.

70. The Wrong Hands by Mark Billingham.

This book follows the return of Detective Sergeant Declan Miller, the slightly dysfunctional Blackpool policeman who made his debut in last year’s The Last Dance.

Like Billingham’s other principal protagonist, DI Tom Thorne, Miller is not a stickler for normal procedure, and has a penchant for feeble jokes. Miller is also troubled by his own cohort of demons – when first encountered in the previous novel, he was on his way back to work for the first time since his wife (also a copper) had been killed. The continuing investigation into her murder (moving at a glacial pace that appals Miller) forms part of the backdrop to this story.

This novel picks up pretty well immediately after the end of The Last Dance. It opens with a fantastic slapstick scene in which two minor criminals unwittingly intervene in what had been planned as a major handover between a professional hitman and the criminal who had hired him. However, unlike sitcoms, it does not develop ‘with hilarious consequences’. The briefcase that was to be handed over goes astray, and is ultimately found to have some gruesome contents.

Billingham is a master plotter of crime fiction, and while the Declan Miller books plough a more humorous furrow than the DI Thorne books, he doesn’t allow the fun to get in the way of constructing a sound story.

72. On Hampstead Heath by Marika Cobbold.

I have to admit that I bought this novel principally because I was visiting Daunt Books in Hampstead, and could see the Heath from the shopwindow. It is not the sort of book that I would normally consider, but I am glad that I succumbed to the local interest, as it was very entertaining.

Thorn Marsh is the leading news reporter/editor working for a London paper (which I took top be an equivalent of the Evening Standard), but, even as the book opens, she is concerned for her future when the paper is taken over by new owners. She finds herself shunted off to a different section where she is unable to deploy her prime skills, and begins to succumb to despair. She needs to find something that might offer a decent story for the features page on which she now works.

As luck would have it, a meeting with her ex-husband leads to just such a story. He shows her a strange photograph that he had taken earlier on the Heath. At her wits end, Thorn makes up a story behind the photo, and publishes it. By one of those quirks of fate, there is far greater interest in her fabricated story than she could have anticipated, and the picture and report go viral.

The book offers a sharp critique of the proliferation of fake news that has gone hand in hand with the reduction of the number of journalists genuinely working on news stories. I also enjoyed the local detail – as a mere Muswell Hillbilly, I don’t aspire to Hampstead life, but I do enjoy my occasional forays onto the Heath. Ms Cobbold captures the feel of Hampstead excellently.

73. A Grave in the Woods by Martin Walker.

This is the most recent instalment in the charming series following Benoit “Bruno” Courėges, Chief of Police in the Dordogne town of Saint Denis.

All the standard components are here – sumptuously described meals, glorious landscapes, and detailed insights into the area’s history, both stretching back to Neanderthal times, and more recently to the region’s troubled period under Nazi occupation in the Second World War. That may make it seem rather formulaic, but that is certainly not the case.

I think that this has been one of the most enjoyable crime fiction series that I have read over recent years, and hope that there will be further instalments to come.

74. Split Second by David Baldacci.

This is yet another David Baldacci thriller, and is the first volume in his series featuring Sean King and Michelle Maxwell. As the novel opens, Sean King is working as a lawyer, having had to resign from his post in the Secret Service several years ago following the assassination of a maverick Presidential candidate to whose protection unit he had been assigned. Ten years later, Maxwell finds herself in a similar position, when the quirky third-option candidate whom she was protecting is abducted.

I found this slightly less plausible (although no less enjoyable) than most of the other Baldacci books I have read recently. He certainly knows how to ensnare the reader’s attention, and to make them suspend their disbelief.

75. A Reconstructed Corpse by Simon Brett.

Down at heel actor Charles Paris has experienced many indignities throughout his lengthy but conspicuously unsuccessful career, but as A Reconstructed Corpse opens he finds himself plumbing new depths. He is back on television, playing the role of Martin Earnshaw, a property developer from Brighton. He is not, however, participating in a drama series, nor even one of the ghastly situation comedies in which he has occasionally landed a supporting part.

Martin Earnshaw has disappeared in rather suspicious circumstances, believed to have fallen foul of local loan sharks after his business became over-extended following some imprudent deals. Charles Paris is, therefore, playing the role of Earnshaw as part of a reconstruction for a real-life crime investigation programme (clearly modelled on BBC's "Crimewatch"). This represents a new low for Charles as he was clearly selected for the part more for his apparent resemblance to the man who has disappeared than in recognition of any acting expertise. There is, however, a positive side to things, as for various reasons the disappearance of Martin Earnshaw (or, more accurately, the plight of his immensely attractive wife) has captured the public's imagination, and Charles's appearance on the programme develops into a continuing role as the investigation into the disappearance gathers pace.

As with all of the books in this entertaining series, Simon Brett manages to retain the integrity and plausibility of his plot while offering a very entertaining portrayal of the jealousies and egos that are manifested in the production of any television series. Charles Paris seems an immensely sympathetic character - not especially gifted as an actor, and certainly flawed as a man. He remains sensitive to the conflicting personalities amongst whom he has to operate, and the reader feels for him throughout the vicissitudes he has to face.

Very entertaining, both for the plot and Charles's continuing struggle to wring any drop of dignity out of an awkward situation, and also for its sardonic insight into the shameless world of television, in which any vestige of good taste is immediately satisfied if there is the merest chance of a boost to a programme's viewing figures.

76. A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

This is the opening volume in Anthony Powell's celebrated twelve novel, largely autobiographical sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time", recounted by Nicholas Jenkins, a barely disguised cipher for Powell himself.

Let me first declare an interest. I have read this sequence many times before, and have been writing (for what seems like several years) a detailed analysis of it and other "romans fleuves" (including Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu", C. P. Snow's "Strangers and Brothers" and Simon Raven's "Alms for Oblivion"), so I am rather biased.

The first thing to say is that this is not a novel in which much actually happens, though the portrayals of characters and the observations of their interactions are acute and highly entertaining. A Question of Upbringing introduces us to Jenkins himself (though one of the most striking aspects of the whole sequence is how relatively little we ever seem to learn about Jenkins/Powell), along with several characters who will feature throughout the rest of the canon with varying degrees of frequency.

It opens in the early 1920s with Jenkins attending a school (clearly Eton, though never formally identified as such) where his closest confreres are Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, with both of whom Jenkins strikes up close bonds. Stringham, who comes from a wealthy but broken home, leaves the school early on in the book, going off to East Africa to spend some time with his estranged father. Jenkins and Templer remain at the school a bit longer until Templer also departs. Other notable characters to whom we are introduced in this section include Le Bas, a querulous yet also long-suffering schoolmaster with aesthetic aspirations, and Widmerpool, a slightly older pupil than Jenkins and his friends, who is notable principally for his lack of conformity.

As the story moves on we join Jenkins on a visit to Templer's home where he is introduced to Jean, Templer's sister, with whom he promptly falls in (entirely unrequited) love and Sunny Farebrother, a seemingly down-at-heel ex-soldier who is trying to carve out a career in The City. After leaving Templer's home, Jenkins spends a few weeks in France, ostensibly to learn the language, and re-encounters Widmerpool with whom he develops a stronger acquaintance than had been possible at school. Finally, he moves on to Oxford where he studies history. Here we meet Sillery, a politically active don, Mark Members, a self-appointed aesthete, and Quiggin, a "professional" northerner with highly radical views. Stringham reappears, back from his Kenyan sojourn.

The summary above completely fails to do justice to the beauty of the writing (the first four pages are among the most marvellous excerpts of prose I have encountered), the acute observation of the interaction of people of different classes, and the muted humour. This novel also sets the slightly melancholic tone that underpins much of the sequence, though Powell never allows this to become oppressive. A beautiful opening to an engrossing sequence.

77. The Three Graces by Amanda Craig.

I didn’t enjoy this novel at all, although I concede that it was well-written. I followed Amanda Craig’s customary approach of taking a relatively minor character from an earlier novel and bring them into the foreground here.

I like that approach, but I just couldn’t come to terms with this story.

78. The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

Donna Tartt can scarcely be called prolific, although I would have though we might be due for another of her engrossing novels fairly soon. Her most recent publication, and third novel, was The Goldfinch which was issued in 2013 following a gap of ten years since its predecessor, The Little Friend, and twenty years after The Secret History. I first read The Secret History shortly after its publication and thought it was extraordinary. Having just re-read it I think that "extraordinary" falls rather too short of the mark! After all, who would have thought that a novel about a group of students studying the Greek and Roman classics could be so gripping?

The story is narrated by Richard Papen, who recounts the events he experienced as a twenty-year-old student from a modest background in California who had enrolled in Hampden College, an exclusive institution in Vermont (apparently modelled upon Bennington College where Tartt herself studied during the 1980s). After a false start at his first college where he had started to study medicine, he embarks upon a humanities course but transfers to Classics, basically because he has become intrigued (almost to the point of obsession) with a small group of students who stand apart from the rest of the campus.

This group consists of Henry, an extremely erudite, wealthy and rather aloof character who seldom seems aware of his immediate surroundings as he ponders aspects of Greek philosophy; Francis Abernethy, a flamboyant flaneur; twins Charles and Camilla McCaulay (as the book was published in 1992 there was no particular resonance of that pairing of names!); and the slightly dysfunctional Edmund Corcoran, known as Bunny. Together they study under the unorthodox but inspiring tutor, Julian Morrow, who encourages them to read widely and to immerse themselves in their subject. This encouragement to explore the classical world to the full proves unfortunate as an experiment to recapture the sensations of a Bacchanal go disastrously awry, and tensions within the group reach extreme levels.

Richard Papen is an immensely likeable character, and his financial struggles merely to survive among his generally affluent fellow students are depicted very plausibly. The individual member of the group, and their tutor, are very clearly drawn, and the internal conflicts are all too readily believed.

(Possible spoiler alert - I don't think this really constitutes a spoiler as it covers something that is referred to in the opening sentence of the Prologue of the book, but I thought I had better play safe and mention it.) The novel opens with Richard recalling the discovery of Bunny who "had been dead for several weeks", and it soon becomes clear how he had died, with the bulk of the novel left to cover the reasons why that had to happen. However, although the denouement comes at the start, the tension and excitement of the novel is maintained deftly, and the reader's attention never falters.

What I find most amazing about this novel is the fact that it was Tartt's debut, and that she was only nineteen when she started writing it. She manages to blend a huge amount of classical erudition with a tautly-crafted suspense novel with a great deftness of touch. This has spawned or inspired a raft of similar books – M L Rio's If We Were Villains being perhaps foremost among them – but none have quite matched up to Tartt’s masterpiece.

79. A Buyer's market by Anthony Powell.

The second volume of Anthony Powell's epic roman fleuve opens with the narrator, Nick Jenkins, presumably in middle age or beyond, looking through the wares on offer at a downmarket auction and recognising four paintings by E Bosworth Deacon. Jenkins then recollects his earliest encounters with Mr Deacon, who had been a friend of his parents, which in turn leads him to recall one of Deacon's paintings, ‘The Boyhood of Cyrus’, which had hung in the hall of a house where he had attended dances. This enables us to return to "real time" in the novel sequence.

Jenkins is now in his early twenties (probably around 1926/27) and is living in a shabby set of rooms in Shepherd Market, a slightly run-down area of London close to the smart neighbourhood of Mayfair. He mentions, more or less in passing, that he is working for a firm that publishes art books ... and that is about all we find out about his day-to-day life. This is a standard Powell/Jenkins trick: although the sequence follows Jenkins’ recollections over twelve volumes, the reader learns next to nothing about him.

Jenkins is, (or at least thinks he may be) in love with Barbara Goring, a slightly noisy, hyperactive girl who plays a prominent part in the world of society dances and balls on whose fringes Jenkins exists. In is as such a ball that Jenkins once again encounters where he encounters Widmerpool, last seen four or five years ago in France when he and Jenkins sent a summer at La Grenadiere where they were trying, with limited success, to learn French. Widmerpool is now moving forward, establishing himself as a solicitor but he expresses designs to enter into the world of business.

After an eventful evening at a society ball, Widmerpool and Jenkins find themselves walking through the back streets of Piccadilly when they literally bump into Mr Deacon who, with his gamine companion Gypsy Jones, has been selling pacifist newspapers at Victoria Station. What seems a mere chance encounter sets off reverberations that will resound through the remaining volumes of this immense, elaborate and enchanting saga. We are also treated to the welcome reappearance of some characters from the previous volume (including Uncle Giles, who has always been one of my favourites!)

Powell's style is always understated, and it is, perhaps, only on a re-reading that the true intricacy of the sequence becomes evident. The books are not full of incident, but they are richly stowed with acute observation and a laconic, sardonic encapsulation of the hopes and fears of the decades between the wars. The humour is exquisite, but there remains an undercurrent of melancholia.

>117 Eyejaybee: I have only read 'Dance' once, but it all twelve volumes are still sitting on my shelves inviting me back.
As we (particularly me, very close to 80) grow older, re-reading becomes increasingly enticing because it is guaranteed not to be wasted time, and always allows a deeper analysis.
But the unread still appeals. As for your romans a fleuve, I have just embarked on Proust and am loving it, I lost interest in Simon Raven after three volumes, and never started CP Snow.
Asd for other long sequences, Aubrey/Maturin of course 9my American wife has read the whole series three times) and the six volumes starting with Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy. And for non fiction, Gibbon's famous Decline and Fall,, which I am now half way through. Wonderfully written.

>118 scunliffe: I agree with you about the difficulty of balancing the desire to revisit old favourites with the constant yen to read new books.
I enjoyed Olivia Manning's Balkan and Levant trilogies. I first encountered them in the early 1980s through an excellent BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, although the books were, of course, even more satisfying. I hope you enjoy Proust. I recently reread Du côté de chez Swann in French, but feel that I will make do with translations for the remainder. My (lack of) mastery of the language was such that I was able to follow the story, but wasn't sufficiently confident to know whether any passages were especially well written.
I haven't read Gibbon yet, but may set that as a goal for retirement whenever that might come around.

81. Jeeves in the Offing by P. G. Wodehouse.

Another foray into the wonderful world of Wodehouse!

This is not, perhaps, the finest of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, but that still leaves plenty of scope for it to be very good. Many of the old favourites are present, including Aunt Dahlia and Roderick Glossop, and we finally get to meet Aubrey Upjohn, former headmaster of Bertie's preparatory school. Connoisseurs of the Wodehouse oeuvre will be pleased to know that the story even features a cow creamer, and Augustus the cat makes a couple of appearances.

The characters are as wonderfully crazy and unreal as ever and the plot has all the customary convolutions, though (as always) Wodehouse resolves all the numerous threads of the story line.

In this outing the story revolves around the complicated course of true love for Roberta "Bobbie" Wickham (one of the seemingly endless stream of gorgeous women to whom Bertie Wooster had at one time been engaged) and Reginald "Kipper" Herring (lifelong friend of Bertie and one of his fellow inmates all those years ago at Aubrey Upjohn's school).

Beautifully written, and faultlessly plotted, this book was as enjoyable now as when I first read it more than forty-five years ago.

82. White Riot by Joe Thomas.

This novel brought back a lot of vivid memories, with its evocative descriptions of civil and political strife from 1978 and 1983. I was fifteen in the earlier of those years, and remember proudly sporting my Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League badges on the lapel of my school blazer (although I would rapidly … and cravenly … remove them once I actually arrived with the precincts of the school as any such political statement, however creditable, would be met with stern rebukes from prefects and teacher alike).

My adolescence was passed in what I now recognise as an almost idyllic existence in rural north Leicestershire, with precisely zero grounds for any rebellion, although at the time I frequently wished for a more urban milieu in which I might hope to find some barricades to man. Joe Thomas makes clear that Hackney in both 1978 and 1983 was far from my Leicestershire Utopia, and that people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent were regularly subjected to vile racist abuse and attacks, frequently ignored (or even abetted) by a local police force all too often sympathetic to the abusers.

The novel follows a selection of characters, including a detective who is trying to amass evidence of police wrongdoing with the help of a couple of undercover operative who have infiltrated extreme groups, a left wing lawyer within Hackney Council who is struggling to find legal methods of limiting the spread of the National Front (early forerunner of the British national Party that still seems to operate today) and a journalist of American extraction who catalogues the principal incidents.

There are some wonderful descriptions of the large festivals arranged across London to spread an anti-racist message, mass marches and the counter demonstrations by left- and right-wing groups that they provoked. There are cameo appearances by Paul Weller and The Ruts (how I loved their big hit Babylon’s Burning back in the day), and a fabulous cast of political figures (real and fictional).

I am not sure that I enjoyed this, exactly – the underlying themes were too grim for that, but I found it an utterly engrossing novel, and I am looking forward to the two following volumes.

83. Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P. G. Wodehouse.

I don’t know whether there is much point offering a synopsis of this book. As with all of the wonderful books recounting the exploits of Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet Jeeves, attempting to describe the characters and the plot would simply make them look ridiculous, and take the gilt off the gingerbread from their timeless magic.

Suffice to say, Bertie finds himself embroiled in the romantic misadventures of his friends, and facing the peril of engagement to the beautiful but overbearing Florence Craye, With the help of Jeeves and his convoluted scheme, Bertie once again dodges the brickbats that Fate hurls at him Oops, (I hope that doesn’t constitute a spoiler!).

To be honest, I would not rank this in the front tier of Wodehouse’s oeuvre, but it is still very entertaining. The writing flows as effortlessly as ever, and while a simple recapitulation of the plot would emphasise its ridiculous nature, at the time of reading the suspension of disbelief comes very easily.

84. The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell.

This is the third volume in Powell's immense roman fleuve, A Dance to The Music of Time, and we have moved on to the early 1930s. (Though never explicitly stated, I assume that this volume is set around 1932 or 1933, based upon the oblique references to Mussolini and the hunger marches to London.) As in all volumes of this deliciously sprawling chronicle, there is relatively little action, but through Powell's customarily delicate admixture, a few social set pieces are worked up to a potent melange of wry observation, outright humour and the odd undercurrent of melancholia.

The Acceptance World opens with Nicholas Jenkins (about whom we learn little more in this book than we have struggled to eke out of the previous two volumes) visiting the Ufford Hotel in Bayswater for tea with his Uncle Giles, always rather a lost soul meandering through life with no aim or hope. As they finish their cheerless meal, they are joined by one of Giles's fellow guests at the hotel, the esoteric-looking Myra Erdleigh. She is certainly more flamboyant that most of Uncle Giles's acquaintances, and Jenkins is initially drawn to her. It turns out that she has rather a reputation as a fortune teller, and is persuaded to ‘put out the cards’ for both Nick and his uncle. She seems to divine some aspects of Jenkins's life including the fact that he had recently had a novel published (which had hitherto been unrevealed to the reader). Although A Dance to The Music of Time is often described as a largely autobiographical sequence, and is narrated by the character of Jenkins, we learn next to nothing about him. Mrs Erdleigh mentions a woman with whom Jenkins will become close, and also refers to a struggle involving one old man and two younger ones which will cause him considerable angst. This sets the scene for much of what will follow throughout the rest of the book.

We are then treated to description of a dinner at the Ritz, a weekend away in the country and then an Old Etonians' reunion dinner, also held at the Ritz. At the latter event we are treated to the re-emergence of both Widmerpool, who has been absent for the rest of the book, and Charles Stringham, who was last briefly seen during the previous volume when he had taken Jenkins, who had encountered him entirely by chance, to a party in Mayfair.

Widmerpool may have been absent for the greater part of the book but he makes up for this when he does finally appear. His unexpected intervention in the final chapter, is characteristically bizarre, and provokes considerable mirth among many of his fellow guests, but reveals the first signs of his relentless thirst for power and advancement.

'Wryly observed and beautifully written' seems to be becoming a bit of a mantra in my reviews of Powell’s magnus opus, but, after all, the reason phrases become clichés is because they are true.

85. Hour Game by David Baldacci.

Sean King and Michelle Maxwell return for their second outing. Following their experiences in Split Second, they have now set up a private detective agency in Wrightburg, Virginia. Their work is progressing well until they find themselves embroiled in the investigation of a series of killings that gradually appear to be the work of a murderer intent on copying the work of famous serial killers.

In fact, King is initially considered as a possible suspect, but he and Maxwell are deputised to assist the local police chief (who seems primarily bent upon solving the crimes before the FBI, who have muscled in on the investigation).

This is a competent thriller, with plenty of plot twists, and a smattering of intriguing characters, although I felt it failed to match up to the author’s finest work.

86. Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse.

Another delightful instalment from the chronicles of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

I won't bother to summarise the plot. For one thing, it is, as usual with Wodehouse's stories, incredibly complicated (though he always managed to resolve all the various threads), but also because when deconstructed it would simply sound very silly. Of course it IS all very silly, but Wodehouse binds it all together in the most enchanting and beguiling way. His use of language, liberally sprinkled with Jeeves's quotations from the classics, and his endearing and enduring characters make the suspension of disbelief very simple.

This particular book is one of the best in the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves series, and features a lot of the leading characters from the oeuvre: D'Arcy 'Stilton' Cheesewright, Lady Florence Cray, Edmund (the lethal boy scout) and Boko Fittleworth, and Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha (who is believed to wear barbed wire close to the skin) is hovering in the shadows.

87. Blue Genes by Val McDermid.

This is the fifth novel featuring Kate Branigan, the Manchester based private investigator, and probably the best one so far (which is saying something as I thought the previous books had all been very strong). As usual, Kate finds herself investigating several cases simultaneously, carefully balancing her time and skills, and somehow managing to keep a grasp on all of them.

The principal storyline, however, which gives the book its name, revolves around the apparently mindless murder of a doctor engaged in extensive research into subfertility and IVF. She was murdered in her own home, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the police are treating it as a case of an attempted burglary that went wrong. Among her patients at the time of the murder were Alex and Chris, Kate’s best friends, who had been referred to her for help with a baby. It is only after the murder, however, that they realise that the doctor had been working under a pseudonym. As there are a lot of sensitivities about their treatment, Alex retains Kate to investigate further, and also to ensure that their records are safe.

As usual, McDermid develops the plot quickly, but plausibly, quickly enfolding the reader in the story. Branigan is an immensely plausible protagonist – capable, occasionally stubborn, and overwhelmingly logical, she knows her limitations, but is not afraid to push herself absolutely to them. In this outing there are additional domestic and work-related challenges that she has to address, and she takes them on adroitly.

88. Red Menace by Joe Thomas.

Like its predecessor, this book brought back a lot of memories, some of which had been buried fairly deeply by the passage of years. The book picks up from Thomas’s previous novel, White Riot, which had recounted life in Hackney in 1978 and then 1983, and the dreadful racist attacks that were prevalent. That novel was told from various perspectives, focusing on undercover police officers, journalists, liberally inclined employees of Hackney Council, and members of the community, and was notable for its blending of fiction with real events.

This book continues that multi-perspective approach and moves onwards from 1983, including the iconic Live Aid concert in July 1985 and then the vicious riot at Broadwater Farm. As now, in 1985 I was living in Muswell Hill in North London, not too far from Hackney and Tottenham, and remember news about the Broadwater Farm riot breaking out. Everyone knew that it was coming, not least because of reports of a raid on the local Express Dairy in which hundreds of milk bottles had been stolen. It was only a matter of time before they would be raining down on the police in the form of petrol bombs.

Joe Thomas captures the horror of that riot very effectively, deftly managing the various strands of his story. The plot is actually for too complicated to be easily summarised here, but Thomas keeps it moving forward.

89. Paddington Abroad by Michael Bond.

I loved the Paddington stories as a child, although, even by the time I was introduced to them in the early 1970s, they were probably already a bit out of date. Indeed, I imagine that they were already rather dated even when they were first published – that is one aspect of their charm. Another is the fact that, unlike the recent films (highly entertaining though they are), all the mishaps and adventures that befall Paddington arise from everyday activities. The normality of the context serves to accentuate the humour and delight of the stories.

I first read Paddington Abroad more tan fifty years ago, at a time when I myself had never been abroad. I was, therefore, utterly intrigued with the accounts of Paddington’s preparations for his first foreign holiday with the Brown family, and enchanted by his adventures once he arrives in France. Now, nearly fifty years later and reading it to my granddaughter, that enchantment remains intact. The stories work just as well now, and my granddaughter was as delighted with this book as I had been.

Michael Bond’s trick is to write with great simplicity, and he never patronises the reader, of whatever age. His humour works on to levels, delighting his child readers at the most direct level, but also appeals to parents (and grandfathers). Paddington has an occasionally alarming honesty, which, supported by his disarming ‘hard stare’, enables him to cut through facades.

In this volume, some of the highlights include Paddington causing consternation at his bank when he attempts to withdraw some money for the holiday, falling foul of passport control, playing the big bass drum in a parade through a French village, and finally even participating in the Tour de France. All very funny and marvellously handled.

90. The Innocent by David Baldacci.

This is the first instalment in the Will Robie series. Robie has lived deep in the secret world for several years, functioning as an assassin for an unspecified agency in the US government.

As the novel opens, Robie is about to turn 40, and is aware that the end of his career might be imminent as middle age starts looming large. This has not dulled his appetite for, or competence at, his work. On his latest job, however, he finds that he hesitates. This has never happened before. Of greater concern, he realises that he is being watched; during his fleeting moment of hesitation, his handler intervenes and kills the target for him. Robie immediately sense that he will be the next target himself.

Writing about it now, the story seems rather too fanciful, but at the time of reading I was completely engaged, and the story unwinds with Baldacci’s customary suspense.

91. Black and Blue by Ian Rankin.

At the time of its release Ian Rankin declared that this was the finest Scottish crime novel yet published. This might seem rather a brash statement for someone normally so self-deprecating as Rankin, although he may well have been right. Of course, it depends upon what one considers as a Scottish crime novel. There had certainly previously been some fine crime novels and stories by Scots writers (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Val McDermid are just two that leap immediately to mind), although perhaps fewer actually set in Scotland.

Rankin has subsequently written Scottish crime novels himself that are even better than Black and Blue, although its publication certainly marked him moving up to a new level. There had already been a few novels in the Rebus series, and some of them had been very strong performances, but this one showed a greater assurance and depth.

Rebus had always been aware of the Edinburgh's dark history, but in 'Black and Blue' the undercurrents are drawn from further afield. As the novel opens, there is a major investigation across all Scotland's police forces (this was written long before the rationalisation of the different police services into one body, Police Scotland) into a series of killings of young women by an unknown assailant dubbed 'Johnny Bible' by the tabloid press. This is a reference to the real spate of unsolved killings of young women in Glasgow in the late 1960s by a murderer who became known as 'Bible John'. One of Johnny Bible's victims had been killed in Glasgow, the second in Edinburgh, and the latest in Aberdeen

Rebus remembered the Bible John killings which coincided with the end of his school days and his joining the army, and felt that somehow they had soured his memories of the late Sixties. As the new investigation into the apparent copycat killings widens, he has been doing his own research, scouring newspapers from the time, and concocting his own theories. This is principally a consequence of his own obsession with unsolved crimes. It is, however, also a means of distraction from growing public outrage about the death of a prisoner who had committed suicide. The prisoner had always maintained that he was innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted and that he had been framed by the police. Rebus had been involved in that investigation, very early in his career in CID, and he is now being plagued by television journalists who are preparing a documentary about the dead prisoner's claims.

Rebus is, however, drawn into an investigation of his own when the body of a man on leave from his job on a North Sea oil rig is found in a run down Edinburgh estate. Certain characteristics of the death lead Rebus to a hitman, formerly employed by one of Glasgow's leading gangland figures. Other associations lead Rebus to Aberdeen, where he finds himself in the fringes of the investigation of the latest Johnny Bible killing.

92. Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart.*

I found this book fascinating. The 1980s is the first complete decade of which I retain clear memories of the social and political issues that were to the forefront. As a decade, it is unusual in that one prime minister was in power throughout virtually the whole decade, and lent her name to the period.

I was just sixteen (and consequently too young to vote) in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Nowadays she remains a divisive figure, subject to rampant vilification among much of the population. I recall, however, the feeling almost of euphoria when she won that first general election. The country had been through a long cold winter, and the seemingly interminable strikes by various groups of public workers (seized on and magnified by a predominantly right-wing press) had eroded public morale. The economy was struggling, and unemployment was high. One of the great ‘what-if’ questions about British politics is to speculate on what might have happened if James (“Sunny Jim”) Callaghan had called an election in the late summer or early autumn of 1978, as many pundits expected. Graham Stewart explores this particular issue in some depth.

One of the biggest problems that Callaghan faced was the bitter rift that developed between Labour and the Scottish Nationalists. He was also unlucky – it seemed that a disproportionate number of Labour MPs died throughout that Parliament, and the tiny majority that Callaghan had inherited from Harold Wilson was eroded by a succession of by election defeats. The SNP withdrew their support for the minority Labour government in March 1979 (branded by Callaghan as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’), which led to the eventual loss of a confidence vote, prompting the general election.

Of course, recognising the cyclical nature of political history, the same question might be asked about Gordon Brown’s decision not to hold what might well have been a confirmatory election when he became prime minister following the resignation of Tony Blair in 2007. Like Callaghan, he had inherited the premiership from his predecessor, although in his case, without even a rigorous internal leadership election within the Labour Party, so remained open to accusations that he lacked a national mandate. (I am not convinced that this is entirely fair in Brown’s case, as Blair had announced his intention to step down mid-parliament before the 2005 election.)

Thatcher’s assumption and then retention of power was notable. In the early years of her premiership the economy faltered, and unemployment rose still further – particularly embarrassing as this had been one of the big issues in her election campaign. Certainly, the surge of patriotism (jingoism?) arising from the Falklands War played a significant factor in her huge majority in 1983, but Stewart points out that the continuing – indeed, deepening – rifts within the Labour Party, and the advance of the Social Democrats, would probably have ensured her second victory anyway.

Stewart goes through all of this in great detail, but with a flair and deftness of touch that prevents the book from ever seeming burdensome. In addition to his sharp analysis of the political history of the period, he provides interesting insight into cultural and social trends throughout the decade, recounting the rise of the video recorder and the introduction of the compact disk. His account of the Broadwater Farm riot in October 1985, in which Keith Blakelock, a London policemen (who lived just down the road from me in Muswell Hill, where there is still a memorial to him) is especially vivid.

I was prompted to read this book after seeing it appear in the Notes and Acknowledgments for Joe Thomas’s novels White Riot and Red Menace, which are set in the more tumultuous years of the decade. It complements the narrative of the two novels very closely.

93. Simple Genius by David Baldacci.

I wonder whether I may now have read too many of David Baldacci’s books within too short a period. I found this third outing or Sean King and Michelle Maxwell rather irritating, and I ran out of patience with the unnecessarily convoluted plot.

I think I will leave a longer break before picking up the next of his books that I bulk bought on offer from Amazon.

94. Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent.

I thought that this novel was super, but then it does seem to encompass a range of subjects very close to my heart.

As one would expect from Susie Dent, the book is strewn throughout with glorious brief apostrophes giving a potted history of the development of a word (some unusual, but also for many commonly used in daily speech). These are beautifully informative, without ever seeming intrusive. The story is also full of Shakespearean allusions, which pulls it deeply into one of my particularly cherished areas, and is set in and around Oxford, so all the principal locations were familiar to me and evoked a lot of fond memories.

The story combines a mystery with a sort of academic treasure hunt. The main protagonists work in the Clarendon English Dictionary (obviously representing the Oxford English Dictionary with which Susie Dent has been so long associated). Their work entails considering potential new entries to the dictionary, or additions to existing definitions, many of which are flagged up to them by keen members of the public.

Among the regular flow of correspondence that they have to manage comes a letter from someone calling themselves ‘Chorus’, offering cryptic hints about a mystery connected with the Dictionary. Further investigation suggests that it may relate to the disappearance a decade previously of the sister of one of the team, who had also herself worked on the Dictionary. Further messages ensue, and the mystery deepens.

What struck me most notably about this book was the deftness with which Dent manages the story. This is, I believe, her first novel, but she delivers a complex plot and very plausible and empathetic characters with the nonchalance of a novelist of long-established standing.

I think that this will be a strong contender for my favourite novel of the year, and I am already confident that I will be re-reading it before long.

95. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas.

I have read several of Scarlett Thomas’s novels, and would count Our Tragic Universe among my all-time favourites, while Popco and The End of Mister Y are both pretty wonderful, too. I did not feel that this latest book, an intriguing take on the epistolary novel, quite matched up with them, although it was still pretty good.

The book takes the form of a collection of documents which relate a series of incidents that occurred to Evelyn and Richard while enjoying their honeymoon on one of the Greek islands. Thomas manages the different narratives very capably, and instils a sense of tension right from the start. The drip feed of revelations, or at least hints, about the protagonists’ pasts proves very gripping, and there is no indication as to which of various red herrings the plot will follow.

I didn't know Susie Dent had written a novel! I keep meaning to read some of hers.

>135 mabith: There has been a crop of recent crime novels by (or at least purportedly by) celebrities, but hers is one of the best that I have read. I have enjoyed her non-fiction books about etymology and semantic shift during the evolution of the English language.

96. Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.

I think that this novel is only really challenged by The Code of the Woosters for the honour of being the finest story in the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves canon.

There are a lot of things one can say about P G Wodehouse's books - immature, very childish, total unworldly, lacking in any political or ecological conscience … It is difficult to challenge any of those judgements (and I should know because most of them have been regularly applied to me, too). However, I prefer to think of them as exquisite, beautifully written, faultlessly constructed, charming and ceaselessly entertaining. Sadly precisely none of those epithets have ever been applied to me!

Right Ho, Jeeves is, to my mind, the apotheosis of Wodehouse's world. His plots are always full of Byzantine twists, his characters are usually hilarious, but in this novel, he excelled his own extremely high standards and brought off a comedy classic.

There are two set pieces in particular (Gussie Fink-Nottle's address when presenting the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School's Speech Day, and the stream of outrage from Anatole, the sublimely talented yet extremely temperamental French chef, when Gussie appears to be pulling faces at him through the skylight of his bedroom) which must rank among the finest examples of humorous writing. If one is prepared briefly to suspend disbelief and enter Wodehouse's world, then the rewards are enormous. This particular book was first published in 1934, but is already looking back to an unspecified Corinthian past, largely of Wodehouse's own imagining.

In this world, gentlemen always wear suits, and occasionally spats though never (in England, anyway) white mess jackets, or not, at least, if Jeeves has his way. They also never bandy a lady's name or break an engagement, no matter how disastrously they might view the prospect of nuptials. Bertie Wooster, though not the brightest chap ever to have ventured into metropolitan life, is a stickler for such correct behaviour, and frequently finds himself beset as a consequence of his scruples.

Wodehouse's writing is a joy - always grammatically perfect, yet he is able to capture the different voices with clinical precision. Bertie rambles in a manner now reminiscent of Boris Johnson (though without the egregious narcissism) ... although, of course, in reality it is the other way round with Johnson trying to sound like Wodehouse, but lacking the charm to pull it off ... while Jeeves favours a cultured orotundity of speech, peppered with a mixture of highly scholarly references to poetry and philosophy, bathetically contrasted with allusions to his rather bizarre-sounding family. The plots are immensely intricate, to the extent that they make Agatha Christie's novels seem entirely transparent, but Wodehouse always ties up every loose end, no matter how impossible that might seem even just one or two chapters from the end of the book.

I have read this novel several times before, and am confident that I will read it several times again, as it never fails to cheer me up.

>133 Eyejaybee: Etymology, and associations with Oxford, are right up my alley. With the exception of the foolish novel Babel.
I have been more or less detached from England, so I don't actually know who Susie Dent is, mea culpa.

>137 Eyejaybee: We just adopted a new, charming and slightly scatter brained puppy. I wanted to call it Bertie but was vetoed even though I was willing to be called Jeeves.

>138 scunliffe: Susie Dent was a senior editor on the Oxford English Dictionary, but became familiar with the public after appearing regularly in 'Dictionary Corner' on 'Countdown, a daily word and arithmetic quiz show (in fact, it was the first programme shown on Channel 4 when it launch in 1982). She used to talk about some of the etymological quirks and oddities of English. She has published several books giving etymological insights. This is her first novel.

97. The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin.

This was the ninth novel featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus, and the reader finds him caught in the middle of a gang war in Edinburgh between the established forces of Maurice Gerald Cafferty ("Big Ger"), Rebus's long-standing foe, and recently arrived upstart, Tommy Telford.

Rebus is not too concerned by the prospect of the gangsters killing each other off, although he knows it will be only a matter of time before innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire. Besides, he has other matters demanding his attention. An eminent retired professor at the city's university has been accused of being a war criminal, complicit in the massacre of the civilian population of a small village in France in the final days of the Second World War. Rebus has been assigned to investigate whether there is a case to answer. In the meantime, personal tragedy intervenes, and Rebus is left wondering whether an apparent accident that befalls his daughter might actually have been something more sinister. It looks like he has chosen the wrong time to try to give up alcohol, especially as he is carrying a half-bottle of whisky around with him, just in case!

Like its predecessor in the series, this showed Rankin and Rebus moving into another gear. There are several parallel plots, all with their own intricacies and inherent plausibility. The relationships between Rebus and both Cafferty and Siobhan Clarke, his often-reluctant protégée, continue to develop, assuming Byzantine intricacies and twists of their own.

98. The Examiner by Janice Hallett.

Over the last few years Janice Hallett seems to have revived, and reconfigured, the epistolary novel. The Appeal took the form of a dossier of documents passed by a barrister to two paralegals for their review of a case, and the reader encountered elements of the story in a fragmentary manner, with individual episodes recounted from different characters’ perspectives. In The Twyford Code, the reader was presented with what purported to be a series of transcripts from various conversations and interviews, while The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels comprised emails, SMS exchanges and other random documents.

I had found this a refreshing experiment with form, and it was clear from all of the books that Ms Hallett had the knack of constructing a sound story, and then delivering it in new ways. I wonder, however, whether in this last book she may have sent the pitcher to the well once too often. I was initially engrossed in this story, which follows a group of students as they embarking upon an arts Masters course, but after wading through seemingly interminable chat transcripts, journal entries and direct messages, I fairly soon found myself wonder why I was bothering.

While her previous novels had decently thought-out plots that enabled the strength of the story to transcend the format, this time I think she has fallen on fallow ground. I found finishing this book was an uphill struggle.

99. Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd.

I have been a huge fan of William Boyd ever since reading A Good Man in Africa more than thirty years ago. Indeed, I feel that he may have a very strong claim to the title of greatest living British novelist.

This book takes the reader to some familiar Boyd territory, with the protagonist being drawn, somewhat reluctantly, into the world of the intelligence services. Gabriel Dax was orphaned at a young age in 1936, and subsequently brought up by his art-dealer uncle. By the early 1960s he has established himself as a successful and respected travel writer. Commissioned to visit the newly independent Congo he is lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview the first post-colonial prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Shortly after that interview, Lumumba is displaced and disappears from view.

This journalistic coup brings Gabriel to the attention of the secret intelligence services, and he is approached by them to perform some straightforward courier duties, for which he is handsomely remunerated. As might readily be predicted, things do not run as smoothly as he had been told they would, and complications soon ensue.

Meanwhile, buoyed by the money that the secret errands bring him, Gabriel starts consulting a psychoanalyst to explore whether episodes in his past, and in particular the death of his mother, are causing the rampant insomnia from which he has suffered for years.

Boyd, as usual, blends all of these story threads very effectively. I don’t think that this novel quite matches up to his masterpieces Any Human Heart or Restless, but it is another very worthy addition to his oeuvre.

100. Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook.*

Dominic Sandbrook set out to write a large book recounting British history during the 1960s, but was faced with the problem of determining at which point to start. The obvious answer might have seemed to be either 1960 or 1961. History is, however, a continuum rather than am infinite series of discrete episodes, and Sandbrook decided that he needed to go back into the previous decade in order to set the appropriate context. As a consequence, he ended up writing two huge books, the first of which chronicles British history from the Suez crisis through to the demise of the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan and, briefly, Alec Douglas-Home.

And what a marvellous and engrossing book. There is no aspect of British life that he has not considered. While the principal focus is on the political events that saw Britain emerging from post-war austerity and moving through economic growth into relative affluence, Sandbrook also explores the nature of public health and education services, the emergence of radio and television broadcasters, newly popular trends in literature and the arts, and the surge of teenage affluence as a major aspect of the national economy. The breadth of subject matter works effectively – it might too easily have been detrimental to the book, taking the reader off at too many tangents, but Sandbrook identifies cohesive threads across and utilises them well. Despite the sheer size of the book, the reader’s attention never flags.

Sandbrook also has that happy knack of combining his extensive research and detailed analysis of the times with an account that is immediately accessible and engaging. Indeed, at times, the book flowed almost like a novel, so clear was his portrayal of the leading characters. He also effectively demonstrates the cyclical aspect of so much of our history. Following the Suez Crisis, Anthony Eden succumbed to ill health, to be succeeded unexpectedly by Harold Macmillan rather than Rab Butler, who had appeared to have been groomed as Eden’s natural successor. Seven years later, Harold Macmillan would himself step down as Prime Minister to be succeeded by another rank outsider in Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

>144 Eyejaybee: This is next up on my Sandbrook reading. I think it says everything about the readability that everyone I finish one of his massive histories I feel like immediately starting another.

101. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman.

I had read all four of Osman’s previous books featuring the Thursday Murder Club, and wondered what direction his new series might take. There is always a slight trepidation when an author whom one likes announces that they are trying something new. This book, is, however, just as enjoyable as its predecessors.

Where the action in the earlier books was all focused on the retirement community where the protagonists live, this hops all over the world, taking in Hampshire, South Carolina, the Caribbean, Ireland, Hampshire again and Dubai. I won’t attempt to give a synopsis of the plot – it is complex, but might seem rather too fanciful if reduce to a few lines on a page, whereas while reading it I found it satisfyingly engrossing.

As always, Osman writes with an accessible and engaging touch, and the text is littered with his humorous asides. I am sure that this will prove to be another runaway bestseller, and it deserves its success.

102. Hunted by Abir Mukherjee.

This story marked a major departure for Abir Mukherjee. I had enjoyed his earlier novels which had followed the investigations of Captain Sam Wyndham, the former soldier served policeman serving in Kolkata in the 1920s. This book, however, is completely different, set in present day America against a backdrop of terrorist strikes.

While his novels featuring Wyndham had developed fairly slowly, with a detailed invstigation of emerging evidence, this is a fast-paced thriller. With the story told from several different characters’ perspectives, and the action moving all around the USA. But although the story moves very quickly, Mukherjee does not neglect to let his characters evolve throughout the story. I was hooked pretty much right from the start, and am looking forward to more of the same in future books.

103. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner.

I bought this as part of a post-payday haul at Daunt Books, without having heard much about it before, being beguiled by the synopsis on the cover. I subsequently learned that it had been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, along with James by Percival Everett, which I also bought as part of the same haul.

In recent year’s, inclusion on that list has not necessarily been an inducement for me to buy the book. I feel that the panel often seem more concerned with strewing clickbait to reap media attention, rather than rewarding literary merit. I was, however, very impressed with this book, so what do I know.

Although the panel on the flap of the dust jacket was sufficiently alluring to prompt my purchase, it is actually very difficult to offer a concise summary of the book. Basically, Sadie Smith is working undercover, having been contracted by a large, possibly multinational corporation, to infiltrate a commune that may be responsible for eco-warrior disturbances in the south of France. The commune’s leader is a charismatic figure who is in turn a follower of Bruno Lacombe, a recluse who, after personal tragedy in the past, has for the last few years lived in a deep network of caves, returning above ground occasionally to email his acolytes.

This may all seem distinctly implausible and unsatisfactory. There is, however, so much more going on, and Sadie is a powerfully drawn character. At the simplest level, she is ruthless in her approach, readily capable of fooling those whom she utilises to get where she needs to go, showing an almost catlike solipsism in the furtherment of her wishes. She is not entirely free of emotion, and appreciates much of what is going on around her, and is not unsympathetic to the aims of the organisation that she infiltrates. She does not, however, allow that to get in the way of her mission.

But the novel offers so much more, with fascinating insights into the political and philosophical roots of environmental campaigns, and a clear exposition of the lives and culture of our Neanderthal forebears, who had initially colonised the network of caves.

Rachel Kushner pulls of an effective literary trick. While she covers a huge amount of territory, offering insights into the history, and indeed prehistory, of the area, and exegesis of various political theories, the story moves along briskly, and certainly held my attention closely.

If the Booker Prize is genuinely awarded on merit (which I have occasionally questioned in the past when it seemed to model itself on FIFA’s blend of opaqueness and perfidy), it will take something rather special to beat Creation Lake.

104. Capital by John Lanchester.

As I grow older, I seem to find myself re-reading a lot of books, and there are some favourites that I have read almost too often to keep count any more. This novel has established itself as one such. I think that this was at least the fifth time I have read it, and I am pretty sure that it will not be very long before I turn to it again.

In many ways it is similar to another recent favourite novel of mine, A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks, which may well be due a re-read soon, too. Both feature the world of banking in the immediate run up to the international financial crisis of 2008, and both touch on aspects of Islamic fundamentalism. There are many more similarities, although there are also considerable differences, and both books stand as fabulous tours de force by novelists at the peak of their game.

Capital opens in late 2007 and revolves around Pepys Street, a small road in south London where house prices, from a modest start over hundred years ago when the road was first built, have rocketed to well over a million pounds. The residents are a mixed bunch and include Roger Yount, a merchant banker with Pinker Lloyd, one of the more successful trading houses in the City, his spendthrift wife Arabella, Freddy Kamo, a highly talented seventeen year old footballer who has just been brought over from his native Senegal to play for one of the London Premiership teams at £20,000 per week and Petunia Howe, an elderly widow who was born in the street more than eighty years ago and has lived there ever since.

As the novel opens, Roger Yount is desperate to find out how large his bonus for that year will be - he is hoping for at least one million pounds and, in fact, can't imagine how he will manage to make ends meet with anything less. On his way to the office he finds a card has been pushed through his letter box bearing a picture of his own front door with the logo "We want what you have". It turns out that all his neighbours have received similar cards, each of them bearing a picture of their respective houses. At first, they all assume that this is merely a marketing gimmick by a local estate agency, but the cards keep coming, followed by DVDs showing footage of the street taken at different times of the day, but never with anyone in shot. And then things start to get nasty ...

In the meantime, Zbigniew, a Polish builder, has been making a decent living from the street. The quality of his building work is excellent, and his jobs are always completed on time to a high standard. Consequently, as soon as he finishes one project, he is quickly snapped up by another household with a new task to take on.

In fact, everyone seems to be getting on with life very happily until Petunia collapses in the local newsagent's shop, and then everything seems to start to unravel.

There are some fantastic set pieces - the scene where Roger is called in to see his boss to hear about his bonus, and Freddy's first appearance in a Premiership match stand out particularly, though there are dozens of other beautifully crafted vignettes. Similarly, the characters, including some of the less central figures, are beautifully drawn, including a shadowy anonymous street artist, clearly modelled on Banksy, and Quentina, a Zimbabwean asylum seeker who is illegally employed as a traffic warden.

The author spent a long time researching the financial background for this novel, as a consequence of which he was able to write Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone, and No-one Can Pay, a fascinating analysis of how the banking crisis occurred, written with great clarity. Two of John Lanchester's previous novels, The Debt to Pleasure and Fragrant Harbour were already among my favourites (the latter particularly so), but I think that Capital utterly eclipses them.

105. Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin.

The ‘Resurrection Men’ of the title of this thirteenth novel in the John Rebus canon were grave robbers, who would dig up recently interred corpses with a view to selling them for use in medical classes. Mention of Edinburgh in this context usually provokes consideration of Burke and Hare, although this belies a misunderstanding of their crimes. They never robbed a grave; they simply killed their victims and sold the bodies on.

For this novel, the term is applied to Detective Inspector John Rebus, and some of his fellow police officers, who like him have transgressed against the standards and rules too often, and find themselves sent to Gartcosh, Police Scotland’s equivalent of the army’s glasshouse, where they must complete a last-chance training course aimed to straighten their unruly ways.

Those familiar with Rebus from Rankin’s previous novels will be aware that he has always been a maverick, and one who was proud of his reputation for disregarding the rule book in order to achieve arrests. He has, however, tried the patience of his senior officers once too often, and a display of petulance during a briefing on a current operation leads to his suspension and the drastic banishment to Gartcosh.

Meanwhile, his regular colleagues are engaged in an investigation into the murder of a local art dealer, who, it emerges, had a rather chaotic and involved private life. As they struggle to make headway, Rebus is back in the classroom where, with some equally crotchety colleagues from police divisions around the country, he is set to rework an old, and never resolved, case.

As always, Edinburgh comes through almost as a character in its own right, and Rankin’s descriptions of the locale are pellucid. He manages the various plot strands with great deftness, too. This is far from the best book in the Rebus canon, but still an enjoyable novel.

106. At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell.

In this, the fourth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell comes close to his most magnificent best!

Taken at the most basic level the novel really only recounts three or four set piece occasions (drinks at an aristocratic house in Kensington, a weekend spent in a country cottage within a landed estate, a Sunday lunch in a gentlemen's club and a drinks party to celebrate an engagement), but from such relatively modest material Powell weaves a glorious tapestry of social observation, wry humour and political commentary.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have read this novel (and, indeed, the whole sequence) yet still I found new facets to wonder at. As ever, though, one learns next to nothing about the detail of the narrator's life. At one point, Nick Jenkins remarks, "I was then at that stage of life when one has published a couple of novels ..." The last that we had heard of this aspect of his life was in the preceding volume The Acceptance World when he professed himself keen to try his hand at writing, but unsure of the best material with which to work.

Jenkins's bête-noire, the loathsome yet beguiling Kenneth Widmerpool, is absent for the greater part of this novel but he does eventually make his customary mark, bursting upon the haut monde scene with the announcement of his engagement to fast-living socialite, the Honourable Mildred Blaides. New territory for our Kenneth, and the reader is intrigued to know how he will take to the domestic lifestyle. Meanwhile Nick Jenkins has his own amatory thunderbolt moment.

While I have always enjoyed the earlier books, I recall that on my first reading of the sequence as a whole, it was with this volume that it all suddenly came alive for me. Nick Jenkins’s observations of the world seem particularly wry, and other characters have suddenly started taking more notice of him.

Read it and enjoy!

107. Die of Shame by Mark Billingham.

I have hugely enjoyed most of mark Billingham’s books, and this was no exception, not least because a fair amount of the action takes place in Muswell Hill, where I have lived for most of the last forty years.

I think this may have marked the first appearance of Detective Inspector Nicola Tanner. She is very precise in her outlook, with a penchant for neatness that veers close to obsession. She is also noted by her colleagues for her lack of sense of humour, although they also acknowledge that she is ‘a good copper’, and one who tends to achieve results.

The story focuses on a group of patients, for want of a better word, who attend a regular therapy session in Muswell Hill where they discuss their respective addictions. Three of them are recovering from advanced drug addictions while another is a recovering alcoholic. The final, and newest member of the group, is there because she is unable to avoid the temptation of binge eating, and her weight has ballooned. The psychologist who oversees the sessions has his own secrets, too.

Obviously with such a group, there are tensions constantly bubbling under the surface, and most of their sessions include at least one eruption of rage. Somehow, though, the group continues, and the participants all seem to derive sufficient benefit from it to want to keep it going.

Of course, eventually one of the group is killed, in a particularly vicious manner, and initial investigations reduce the pool of likely suspects to the other people involved in the group. Nicola Tanner leads the investigation.

Billingham is masterful at developing plausible characters, and at building suspense. He is also careful to ensure that his detectives are representative of the real world and have their own personal struggles in life to contend with, alongside their workload. Tanner is as well drawn a character as Tom Thorne, Billingham’s customary protagonist (who makes an uncredited cameo appearance towards the end).

All in all, another entertaining novel.

108. The Wizard of the Kremlin by Guiliano da Empoli.

This was a serendipitous purchase. I just happened to be in Daunt Books when one of the members of staff starting setting out a pile of newly-signed copies, left over from a talk in the shop on the previous evening. The synopsis on the cover seemed appealing, and as I was on one of my regular post-payday forays, I succumbed to temptation and bought it.

The book takes the form of an account by a journalist of a meeting he had had with a former member of the inner circle of the Russian President, who recounts his life story, and explains the curious but irresistible rise of his erstwhile boss. It was fascinating, retelling recent history with which we are all familiar from an unexpected perspective. More than anything else, I was left thinking of the podcast The Rest is Politics US, in which Anthony Scaramucci relates his experiences as an insider within President Trump’s 2016 campaign and then his notably brief time as Director of Communications at the White House

This is certainly not cast as an apologia for Putin’s ascendancy in Russia, although it did make me stop to think about some events from a slightly different perspective. Novelist Giuliano da Empoli has clearly researched Putin’s background and meteoric rise in depth, and charts his progress, and alarming acquisition of ever greater power.

109. A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks.

This is a very powerful contemporary novel set in London from a master of literary fiction.

Structured like a thriller, A Week in December takes place over the course of a single week at the end of 2008. Set in London, it brings together an intriguing cast of characters whose lives apparently run on discrete and parallel lines but — as it gradually becomes clear — are intricately related.

The central anti-hero, John Veals, is a shadily successful and boundlessly ambitious Dickensian character who is trading billions. The tentacles of Veals’ influence encompass newspaper columnists, MPs, businessmen, footballers, a female tube driver, a Scottish convert to Islam, a disaffected teenager, and a care worker, whose different perspectives build up a tale of love, family and money as the story builds to its powerful climax. All of the characters are utterly believable, and finely drawn, and Faulks displays complete mastery in the manner in which he interleaves their stories.

At times hilarious, yet also steeped at times in melancholic resignation, this novel also offers some poignant insights. The most striking of these was Gabriel Northwood's passionate lament over the failure of the education system, and the sad descent from a halcyon age when children were taught for the sheer sake of learning rather than to equip them to take on jobs that might no longer be there.

>148 Eyejaybee: I became rather jaded about the Booker around 2009 when The Secret Scripture (by Sebastian Barry) lost to The White Tiger (by Aravind Adiga). It was the first year I became conscious of the Man Booker’s manipulation of the media & public. I’m sure they thought it was masterful PR in “leaking” the winner that year (Barry) only to surprise everyone with announcing Adiga, but I felt disillusioned and became rather jaded about their selections and winners ever since.

110. The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie.*

I was recently enchanted by Guilty by Definition, Susie Dent’s first novel, which was set in and around an institution that was clearly modelled on the Oxford English Dictionary. I was first introduced to the OED as an undergraduate. Obviously I had heard of this 26 volume leviathan before, but until then I had never stopped to consider the benefits for a scholar of such a book. What makes the OED sop large is not just the exhaustive list of headwords, but the glorious selection of illustrative quotations that demonstrate how the meanings of words have evolved over time.

I rapidly became obsessed with the OED, and one of my proudest acquisitions was a huge hard copy of it that reproduced nine pages from the original on each wafer like leaf, and came with a dedicated magnifying glass. From there I eventually graduated to the complete version, with, with its various addenda now extend over two bookcases in my study. Nowadays I tend to access it digitally (after all, those large volumes are hard to manoeuvre), and frequently pass untold hours leaping from one entry to another, savouring the semantic shifts captured there.

However, until I read Susie Dent’s novel, I hadn’t stopped to think about how the dictionary had been compiled, and who had combed the corpus of literature to collate the supporting illustrative quotations. Ms Dent’s novel referred to the hundreds of thousands of slip submitted by the veritable army of volunteers who supported the OED ever since it was launch in the late nineteenth century.

Sarah Ogilvie worked on the editorial staff of the OED for several years, and became very familiar with the slips that continue to be sent in with quotations demonstrating odd usages of words. Having pred over them as part of her regular job, she was prompted to explore more about these volunteers, and also about the staff directly employed by the OED in its early years. They were a varied bunch, and included murderers, patients from Broadmoor Mental Hospital and a huge cast of characters scattered around the world.

I found this book utterly charming, dipping in every few days for a couple f chapters. Ogilvie has a lightness of touch that enables her to share her own advanced scholarship with the lay reader. This was highly entertaining, yet also informative.

111. A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin.

Former Detective Inspector John Rebus is back, but facing an unprecedented challenge. As the twenty-third novel in the series opens, Rebus (now retired and suffering from COPD) is in court for a criminal trial. While that may seem a familiar enough scenario for him, this time he is in the dock, and his prospects look bleak.

From that opening the story moves back a little way back into the past, with a serving police from Edinburgh’s Tynecastle police station under investigation for allegations of domestic violence. Knowing how grim a time a former police officer is likely to have if sent to prison, the officer claims that his behaviour had been influenced by PTSD suffered as a consequence of what he had witnessed during his time at Tynecastle, about which all sorts of complaints had been made in the past. In a bid to try to limit the potential damage that such testimony might make if aired in court, the upper echelons at Police Scotland (*the newly created national constabulary covering the whole of the country) have assigned Detective Inspector Fox, formerly of ‘The Complaints’ (as the internal affairs department is known throughout the force), to investigate allegations of corruption at Tynecastle.

Fox is never reluctant to investigate the misdeeds of fellow officers, particularly when there is the additional spur of potential promotion if he can secure a positive outcome. The officers in Tynecastle are aware of his reputation, and band together to offer a concerted defence, checking on with former colleagues who have now retired. Of course, who should turn out to have worked there in the past but Rebus himself, although he was never part of the more corrupt inner circle.

Meanwhile, firmer gangland supremo Maurice Gerald (‘Big Ger’) Cafferty, confined to a wheelchair following a shooting a year or so previously, has asked Rebus to try to find someone who had fled from Edinburgh some years ago, after having been found to have ripped Cafferty off. Rebus can not work out Cafferty’s motives, but out of interest agrees to do some delving. The deeper he digs, the closer the two storylines seem to become.

Ian Rankin has taken the reader into similar territory before, most notably in Saints of the Shadow Bible where similar allegations about rogue police officers taking the law into their own hands had been made. This book offers a slightly different perspective on the issue, and further insights into Rebus’s past as a junior detective.

As always with Rankin and Rebus, the tension is maintained throughout, and several different plotlines are carefully interlaced. I felt that this did not quite match up to its predecessor, A Song for the Dark Times, but then that was one of the strongest individual instalments in the sequence. This is certainly a strong addition to the set

112. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell.

I find it very difficult to explain the charm of Anthony Powell's autobiographical roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, although the intensity of the attraction is undeniable. As with the previous volumes, very little actually happens throughout this, and we continue to next to nothing about Nick Jenkins, the narrator and clear avatar for Powell himself.

This particular instalment immerses us in the chaotic classical music community of pre-war London, and introduces the troubled genius of composer Hugh Moreland (apparently closely based upon English composer Constant Lambert, whose son Kit, incidentally, would later discover The Who in the early 1960s). Moreland will evolve into one of Jenkins's closest friends, although the initial impression of him is less positive. In addition to Moreland, we also meet Moreland's wife Matilda, an aspiring actress and former mistress of business magnate Sir Magnus Donners (who has at various times been a patron of Moreland himself), the querulous critic Maclintick and his shrewish wife Audrey, and a handful of other musicians and critics.

We are also treated to the return of some old friends, with cameo appearances by Mark Members and J G Quiggin (still locked in their rivalry, each vying for literary supremacy over the other) and a very humorous tour de force from Charles Stringham, now a mere shadow of his former resplendent self. The egregious Widmerpool is back, too, although in this volume he is more peripheral than in the preceding books, and his presence is restricted to a chance encounter in a hospital where he is being treated for "a slight nuisance with boils", followed by a luncheon engagement in which he treats Jenkins to an unintentionally humorous account of his recent encounter with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, shortly before his all-too-brief succession as Edward VIII, and the Abdication, which Widmerpoool takes badly, almost as a personal affront..

I have recently been re-reading a lot of P G Wodehouse, whose marvellously entertaining novels similarly evoke a now distant world in which all the principal characters live in a small sector of London bounded by Oxford Street to the north and The Mall to the south. Wodehouse's humour is direct - pure farce delivered in beautiful prose, while Powell's humour is more subtle, and inextricably interlaced with a surging melancholy, but no less powerful or engaging.

>151 Eyejaybee: I have only read this series through once, and certainly enjoyed it. Like you I find myself doing more re-reading as life becomes more obviously shorter every day.
So 'Dance' is a prime candidate, but I hesitate; a commitment to 12 more novels........What good unread works will they stop me finding? If I did not love my large family so much, I would allow the hidden hermit in me to emerge. I think from now on I need two parallel lives, or possibly more.

113. There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

I embarked upon this with a slight feeling of trepidation. I had heard a lot of positive comments about it, but they all seemed tinged with a sense of concerted worthiness, which is far from my own milieu. However, I rapidly found myself completely enthralled.

The book ranges in time from the Assyrian kingdoms of more than three thousand years ago, through the latter half of the nineteenth century and then almost up to the present day. Elif Shafak uses the endless cycle described by a drop of water as her vehicle for traversing these different times and locations. Water falls as rain, flows about the globe and is occasionally consumed and then released before being evaporated back to the clouds.

There are various different narrative strands. One focuses on Arthur, born into poverty by the Thames in nineteenth century London, whose almost infallible memory enables hi to becomes an expert on the cuneiform inscriptions discovered by archaeologists, in which The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature, is contained. A second thread follows the travails of Zaleekhah, an academic who has been studying the nature of water, and having just separated from her husband, has moved into a houseboat moored on the Thames. The third storyline follows Narin, a young Yezidi girl who suffers from a medical complaint which is gradually robbing her of her hearing. She lives with her grandmother who has a fund of glorious stories setting out the history and beliefs of their people.

The stories are carefully interlaced and together offer a potent tapestry. Not only did this beautiful novel serve as an introduction to much of the history of the Yezidi and the Assyrians – hitherto my only awareness of them was from Byron’s poem, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib, which I had been made to learn at primary school – but it provided a powerful and engaging story. It is not always an easy read – there are some dreadful incidents – but it is a rewarding one

114. Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin.

Ian Rankin has wrung a lot of mileage out of John Rebus as a fictional character. Prior to his long career as a policeman in Edinburgh he had served as a soldier with at least one stint in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. After decades in Edinburgh’s CID he had retired, before recuring to work in the police force as a civilian associate, helping in a cold case unit. Even after retirement finally claimed him, he had loitered on the fringes of several cases, retaining his odd relationship with gangland boss Maurice Gerald Cafferty.

At the end of the previous novel, A Heartful of Headstones, we found Rebus on trial for the murder of Cafferty, with an abrupt cliffhanger intervening before the verdict was delivered. As this book opens, we discover which way the verdict had gone, with Rebus now an inmate of HMP Edinburgh, better known to everyone as Saughton. Obviously, life is never easy for any former police officer who might find themselves convicted in prison, possibly among criminals that they had helped put there. Rebus is constantly on the alert although his position is not as dire as might have been the case. Darryl Christie, once one of Cafferty’s most ambitious rivals, has offered his informal protection to Rebus, as a mark of gratitude to the former copper for his role in Cafferty’s death.

The scene is well set, then, for complications, which rapidly abound after one of the other prisoners housed on Rebus’s landing is murdered during nighttime hours, when prisoners are locked in their cells. This brings an investigating team from the local police, who are accompanied by Rebus’s old sparring partner Malcolm Fox, formerly of the Complaints. Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is following her own case, investigating the disappearance of a schoolgirl, who may have had some unsavoury contacts.

I enjoyed this novel, which was markedly different from its predecessors, given the unusual surroundings in which Rebus finds himself. There were some interesting developments for those readers who are familiar with the series. DI Fox has always been a bit of an outsider, but in this book he shows some unusually Machiavellian traits, that I am note sure are consistent with what we know of him from before.

115. The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell.

Re-reading this marvellous novel was immensely entertaining. I remember reading the sequence for the first time about forty years ago, and feeling that it was with this volume that it really came to life in my mind.

This sixth volume of Powell's majestic Dance to the Music of Time sequence starts with a recapitulation of memories of Nick Jenkins's childhood, and in particular the suitably apocalyptic events that occurred in Stonehurst, the remote bungalow a few miles from Aldershot in which he grew up, on what proved to be the day on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

We are reintroduced to both General Conyers and Jenkins's meddlesome Uncle Giles, and also at last have some insight into Jenkins's family life. We also encounter Dr Trelawney, self-styled thaumaturge-cum-alchemist, whose presence in the neighbourhood cast pangs of fear into the young Jenkins's mind.

After a glimpse into Jenkins' childhood, with a brief but characteristically disruptive cameo from Uncle Giles, we are brought back to the months leading up to the Second World War, and the struggle to eke out an economic subsistence during a period particularly unsympathetic to the arts. Hugh Moreland plays a big role, as does the menacing Kenneth Widmerpool, who is as pompous and odious as ever.

In this particular volume General Conyers, old, venerable and seen by many as a relic from a bygone age suddenly establishes himself as one of the pivotal figures in the sequence, and is unmasked as an innovator and conduit for modern thought.

116. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain.

I purchased this very speculatively in Daunt Books on the recommendation of a colleague, primarily with a view to taking my purchases on that outing over the £100 threshold to trigger the shop’s loyalty reward scheme. My speculation was well rewarded, and not merely in loyalty card points! It is a very entertaining novel.

The book takes the form of Marianne Clifford’s recollections of her life, starting in the early 1960s at the age of 15 when she fell deeply in love with Simon Hurst, an eighteen-year-old who attended the boys’ school affiliated with her own institution. Marianne has a quirky, self-deprecating style which is very appealing, and lends a comic cast to her memories.

I enjoyed the insight into life in the 1960s – not quite as hedonistic as the standard portrayal of the swinging decade would suggest. Marianne’s slightly naïve outlook on life lends itself to some poignant scenes that contrast sharply, but effectively with the general air of light humour.

I thought this was a charming and very enjoyable book.

117. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse.

This novel brings features a wide selection of familiar characters from the Elysian world of Bertie Wooster.

There are a lot of things one can say about P G Wodehouse's books - immature, very childish, total unworldly, lacking in any political or ecological conscience … It is difficult to challenge any of those judgements (and I should know because most of them have been regularly applied to me, too). However, it is equally valid, and to my mind infinitely preferable, to consider them as exquisite, beautifully written, faultlessly constructed, charming and ceaselessly entertaining. Sadly, precisely none of those epithets have ever been applied to me!

In this world, gentlemen always wear suits, and occasionally spats though never (in England, anyway) Alpine hats, or not, at least, if Jeeves has his way. They also never bandy a lady's name or break an engagement, no matter how disastrously they might view the prospect of nuptials. Bertie Wooster, though not the brightest chap ever to have ventured into metropolitan life, is a stickler for such correct behaviour, and frequently finds himself beset as a consequence of his scruples.

Wodehouse's writing is a joy - always grammatically perfect, yet he is able to capture the different voices with clinical precision. Bertie rambles in a manner now reminiscent of Boris Johnson (though without the egregious narcissism) ... although, of course, in reality it is the other way round with Johnson trying to sound like Wodehouse, but lacking the charm to pull it off ... while Jeeves favours a cultured orotundity of speech, peppered with a mixture of highly scholarly references to poetry and philosophy bathetically contrasted with allusions to his rather bizarre-sounding family. The plots are immensely intricate, to the extent that they make Agatha Christie's novels seem entirely transparent, but Wodehouse always ties up every loose end, no matter how impossible that might seem even just one or two chapters from the end of the book.

118. The Waiting by Michael Connelly.

This novel marks the return to the forefront of Renee Ballard, who has been fairly quiet for the last couple of books. She is still managing the Cold Case Unit, which relies on significant input from a troop of volunteers, each of whom offers a slightly different skills set, although they are not without their unique challenges, too. As the book opens, Ballard shows that she is not exempt from mishap too, when she is the victim of an audacious theft.

The Unit finds itself bolstered by the support of a new volunteer – Madeleine Bosch daughter of the revered, and now retired, Harry. Maddy is a uniformed police officer, but, being very clearly a chip off the old block, wants to help out with cold cases, both to help see justice served, but also as a means to hone her detection skills. One of the cold cases that she and Ballard end up reviewing is the infamous Black Dahlia case (which has similar aspects to the murder of Harry Bosch’s mother more than fifty years earlier). She also stumbles upon a possible terrorist threat.

Ballard is a pragmatist and is in many ways a disciple of Harry Bosch’s former approach to investigation. They both espouse the belief that either everyone counts, or no one counts. She does, however, have a lot on her plate in this book, and is also distracted in part by worries about her mother who is currently missing after a hurricane had wreaked devastation in Hawaii.

One aspect that I found particularly interesting in this book was the question of Ballard’s age. At one point, when Ballard and Maddy are working together, someone sneeringly asks whether they are a mother and daughter team. I had always assumed that Ballard was a lot younger, and possibly one a few years older than Maddy.

119. Dead Souls by Ian Rankin.

This is the tenth novel in the series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus, and the first to offer a deep insight into his past, before he became a police officer.

It opens with Rebus lurking in the grounds of Edinburgh Zoo, where he is one of a team looking out for someone who, over the past couple of weeks, has been poisoning some of the animals. Rebus has a lot on his mind, including the recent death of a colleague who had been tipped for great things within the force, until he fell to his death from the precipitous Salisbury Crags near Arthur’s Seat.

While musing on this, his attention is caught by someone else whom he recognises as a past sex offender. His ire is further piqued when he believes that this man is taking pictures of children in the crowded zoo. Recognition is mutual, and the man runs away. Rebus gives chase, and eventually corners and arrests. But things are not what they seem.

Meanwhile he has been contacted by two people with whom he went to school. Their son has gone missing, and they want to enlist his help. This encounter from the past offers an opportunity for Rankin to fill in some of the details of Rebus’s youth, which are fascinating for habitués of the series.

This is another solid addition to the canon – not Rebus and Rankin at their mid-season best, but still very enjoyable and rewarding.

120. The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe.

I have been a great fan of Jonathan Coe, and have enjoyed most of his previous books (although there have been a couple that I struggled with). I found this one very frustrating. For the overwhelming majority of the book, I thought it was excellent, and likely to end up in my top ten novels for the year. However, I found the ending and resolution very annoying, and a deep disappointment.

The novel is set during that brief period of the Liz Truss premiership, and the key events occur in and around the fringes of a conference held by right wing political theorists, which is infiltrated by Chris, a liberal blogger who suspects that there are more serious moves afoot.

Coe is as sharp as ever in his portrayal of the potential … indeed relentless … hypocrisies of politicians, and this is given an extra piquancy as everyone knows that things will probably not end well for La Truss. The novelist also deploys great dexterity in the way in which he weaves different storylines, and different narrations together, offering the reader several perspectives on the unfolding story.

Unfortunately, to my mind, he took this a little too far, and I felt that the narrative device that brings the book to a close was simply irritating.

It did, however, prompt me to re-read his excellent earlier book, The Rotters’ Club, which I enjoyed as much now as I did almost twenty years ago when I first read it.

121. Against the Grain by Peter Lovesey.

This was another disappointing book, and proved a rather unworthy end to what had been an enjoyable, and sometimes excellent, series of novels. The grumpy, down-to-eart Luddite, Superintendent Peter Diamond, has been one of my favourite literary detectives, and has featured in some outstanding earlier books. Bloodhounds, for example, is among my favourite novels of any genre.

In this book, he and his partner Paloma are invited to visit his former colleague, Julie Hargreaves, who had begun her police career working for him until his frequently overbearing manner had driven her to seek a transfer. Now retired, she is living alone in the country, and asks Diamond and Paloma to stay for a few days. Odd things have been happening in the village, and its most infamous former resident is about to be release from prison, where she had served a nine year sentence for manslaughter. Needless to say, Diamond soon finds himself caught up in events.

I found this book rather clumsy, an, unusually for Lovesey, struggled to summon any interest in the plot. I wonder whether it might have been better for this series to have ended on a high a couple of instalments earlier.

122. Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

I thought this was an extraordinary novel, and can readily see why it has won so many awards and plaudits. To be honest, I have not always viewed the news that a particular book has won the Booker Prize as a clear recommendation. I have read several previous winners and wondered if I was reading the same book as the judges. This time, however, I can clearly see what moved the judges.

At the simplest level, the book is an account of the passage of a day in the International Space Station, during which it completes sixteen orbits of the Earth. But it is so much more than that. Although only a very short book (scarcely more than a novella), Samantha Harvey manages to give us pellucid insight in to the lives of the six inhabitants, while also offering a beautiful perspective on the home planet as the satellite races through its path. A storm is forming over the Philippines, and the station has a ringside view as it develops and moves towards land. One of the astronauts had been there during his honeymoon, and speculates on the fate of the family of a fisherman whom he had met. Another of the station’s occupants learns some tragic news and has to consider how she will revise her attitude to life, knowing that she has to weave her grieving around her daily schedule in the relative isolation that the space station affords.

The descriptions that Harvey offers of the home planet are beautiful and astounding, and swathed in hope.

123. Cards on the Table. by Agatha Christie.

I think that this is one of Agatha Christie’s strongest novels, and shows her ability to play with the format of the whodunnit story. In fact, in her previous novel featuring Hercule Poirot, The A B C Murders, he speculates about the possibility of an intense mystery perhaps arising from a game of bridge in which someone is murdered by one of the players while they are the dummy hand’ but with none of the other players noticing.

That is precisely the scenario for this story. Christie’s occasionally brutally of sentiment is evident here, and the victim, the enigmatic Mr Shaitana, is portrayed as an especially odious man whose death provokes interest but little sympathy. In a chance meeting he had boasted to Poirot that he ‘collected’ murderers, and invites him to dinner, along with Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the noted mystery writer (clearly meant as a humorous avatar from Christie herself), Superintendent Battle from Scotland Yard, and Colonel Race, a leading figure in the Intelligence Service. There are four other guests who are all civilians, with the implication being that at least one of them is one of Mr Shaitana’s collection of murderers. This imputation seems to be borne out when Mr Shaitana is himself murdered, unnoticed by the four ‘civilians’ who are playing bridge in the same room.

The four investigative figures all participate in the hunt for the killer, with various startling revelations along the way. Without wishing to be guilty of too great a spoiled, Poirot finds a solution.

All very enjoyable – Christie close to her enticing best.

>170 Eyejaybee: I agree with your concerns about reading Booker Prize winners but you have convinced me to read Orbital, thanks James.

>172 bryanoz: I Hope you enjoy it, Bryan.

124. The Enigma Girl by Henry Porter.

Slim Parsons is a great protagonist. As this novel opens, we learn that she is working on an archaeological dig in East Anglia that has just retrieved what seems likely to be a significant find. However, we discover that this is not her primary occupation. She is, in fact, an MI5 officer who has been in hiding since her undercover assignment on a lengthy operation came to a dramatic and unforeseen end. Slim has been hiding as much from her former colleagues as from potential reprisal by the subjects of the failed operation.

After she is readmitted into the fold, she is assigned to a new operation to investigate, and hopefully infiltrate, a news website based in central England which seems to be accessing far too much sensitive and classified information, to the chagrin of the government. Having some previous experience as a reporter, Slim undertakes this mission, but finds herself being sidetracked by a dangerous mix of personal tragedy and the uncovering of substantial leads into some major criminal networks.

Henry Porter manages the separate story strands very capably, and the tension develops at breakneck pace. Slim is a highly plausible character, complete with her own flaws and blind spots. I also enjoyed the locations, which seemed very authentically drawn.

I hope that this might prove to be the start of a series.

125. A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont.

One source of pride for those of us on the dark blue side of the centuries-old Oxbridge rivalry is the absence of a notorious Oxford spy ring, while the history of treachery is littered with alumni from that institute over in the fenlands. Of course, this may merely mean that any such circle of traitors recruited through Oxford connections has yet to be uncovered, but perhaps that might also be a source of pride, in that Oxonians cover their tracks more effectively.

But I digress. It is just such a circle of establishment figures recruited against the backdrop of the dreaming spires of Oxford that lies at the heart of this gripping spy novel by Charles Beaumont. His protagonist, Simon Sharman, is a former MI5 officer who now works in the shadowy fringes of the private intelligence sector, although with limited success. His financial travails are temporarily alleviated when a larger operator in the field subcontracts him to take on what initially purports to be a fairly routine vetting procedure. This unexpectedly propels Simon back into his own past as an undergraduate in Oxford, brushing up against several of his contemporaries who have secured greater status in their later lives that him.

In recent years I have become fairly ruthless at abandoning books that do not engage me very quickly, and I came very close to giving up on this one, as the plot seemed to advance with almost glacial slowness over the first few chapters. However, I am glad that I persevered, and am now eagerly awaiting the publication of A Spy at War, the sequel scheduled for early next year.

Cards on the Table is one of my favorite Poirots as well, both of the novel and the TV show, I had such a big Bridge phase as a kid (that's normal, I'm sure) and it never quite faded. Definitely need to re-read that one next year.

>176 mabith: I remember particularly enjoying Cards on the Table as a teenager because I had been part of what was, for my deeply traditional school, rather an enlightened experiment in which some of us were taught how to play bridge, as that was seen as a valuable social resource. For reasons i am unable to fathom, apart perhaps from my general avoidance of polite society, I have never kept the game up, which I now see as a shame.

126. Karla's Choice by Nick Harkaway.

I am a huge admirer of the works of John le Carré. I know that he is feted as one of the greatest ever writers of spy fiction, although I feel that this (while unquestionably true) rather misses the point and that he was simply a great writer, regardless of genres. He showed a sharp, and at time almost alarming, ability to explore the darker crevices of the human experience.

As it happens, it is four years ago today that le Carré died, although since then his oeuvre has been boosted by posthumous publication of Silverview (drawn from an incomplete manuscript finished by Nick Harkaway - his son), and this book which, as I understand it, was written by Harkaway drawing upon copious notes that le Carré had written over the years.

Sadly, I don’t think it quite works. It is certainly a good spy story, able to compete with a lot of other works in this increasingly popular genre, but I think it falls well short of le Carré’s customary standards. Perhaps my expectations were just a little too high.

127. The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe.

What a fantastic and evocative novel! This book had a little bit of everything: huge dollops of great humour, interwoven with moments of deep tragedy and poignant reflection, served up with a piquant sauce of 1970s musical references and insights into life in the Midlands. It also includes what I believe is one of the longest sentences in English literature, coming in at around

I feel I shared a lot of Jonathan Coe’s experiences. Granted, I grew up in what we now call the East Midlands (although no one used that term back in the 1970s) rather than in Coe’s Birmingham, so my recollections of teenage years in North Leicestershire hark back to an even more culturally neglected wasteland than he can draw upon. I also attended a school very similar to the one depicted here – a selective, direct grant school that subsequently evolved into an independent, private school. I think I am two or three years younger than him, but also feel that it probably took changing popular trends a couple of years to penetrate to North Leicestershire, so I felt closely in step with the musical tastes and opinions of the protagonists of this book.

At the simplest level, the book follows a group of boys as they make their way through grammar school in Birmingham in the 1970s. Coe deftly uses their experiences passing through the school as a way of recounting various events from 1970s history. He also uses the fraught experiences of British Leyland, and in particular its huge factory in Longbridge, as a vehicle (sorry, I couldn’t resist that) for exploring the desperately difficult industrial relations at the time, which seemed to reach a crisis point during the Wilson and Callaghan government. He also touches on the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the ’Birmingham pub bombings’ in which one of the characters becomes too closely involved.

I particularly enjoyed the various boys’ attitudes to rock music, a subject which was ardently debated among my own school friends. At one point, one of the boys writes a review of the landmark Yes album, Tales from Topographic Oceans, an album that it is possible that a friend of mine might once have owned and revered (although obviously I don’t mix with that sort of prog rock fan any more).

There is a darker side (if advocacy of 1970s progressive rock isn’t already sufficiently triggering for some folk), and some of the less wholesome aspects of political attitudes come under the spotlight, too. I remember proudly wearing my Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism badges during that period (well, when I wasn’t forced to remove them by teachers who felt that that sort of freedom of expression was inappropriate at Loughborough Grammar School). The seething undercurrent of racism is never far away in this book, as it never was in 1970s Britain, and Coe captures it wonderfully.

128. The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell.

This seventh volume of Anthony Powell's majestic semi-autobiographical roman fleuve opens with Nicholas Jenkins arriving in North Wales to join his regiment in the very early days of the Second World War. Despite his age (he is by now in his mid-thirties), Nick has managed to secure a commission as a second lieutenant, and finds himself serving under Captain Rowland Gwatkin.

Before the war, Gwatkin had worked in a bank in the same area of Wales from which most of the members of the regiment’s 'other ranks' were drawn, although most of them had been miners. In all other spheres of life Gwatkin is essentially a prosaic and pragmatic man, but he is prey to a romantic fascination with every aspect of the army, although he seldom demonstrates the skill to carry his military dreams through to fruition.

This is the first of three volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time that cover the Second World War, and, taken together they constitute one of the finest accounts of that conflict that I have read. Jenkins does not see active service in any theatre of war, and spends much of his time engaged in routine regimental duties, but this gives him a marvellous opportunity to exercise his laconic observation. Among Jenkins's fellow subalterns are Idwal Kedward, an ambitious and capable young man endowed with an extraordinary bluntness of speech, and Bithel (we never learn his forename) a down at heel opportunist who is wholly out of his depth in the army, but touchingly desperate to perform as well as he can.

Bithel's greatest problems arise from his occasional but ferocious drunkenness and the various myths he has promulgated about himself and his background; his claims to be a brother of the officer of the same name who secured a VC in the 1914-18 War, and to have played rugby for Wales in his youth are just two examples. The character of Bithel is a prime example of Powell's dexterity at blending humour with an underlying melancholy (perhaps the emotion that most powerfully runs through the whole sequence). Steeped in inadequacy, Bithel somehow manages to overcome, or at least dodge the plethora of challenges that come his way.

Meanwhile Gwatkin’s idealised impression of military life is also subjected to a series of challenges arising from the sheer mundanity of institutionalised life. As with most of the rest of the novels in this sequence, nothing much happens, but the book remains utterly gripping.

Another triumph!

129. White Heat* by Dominic Sandbrook.

Dominic Sandbrook set out to write a large book recounting British history during the 1960s but was faced with the problem of determining at which point to start. The obvious answer might have seemed to be either 1960 or 1961. History is, however, a continuum rather than am infinite series of discrete episodes, and Sandbrook decided that he needed to go back into the previous decade in order to set the appropriate context. As a consequence, he ended up writing two huge books, the first of which chronicles British history from the Suez crisis through to the demise of the Conservative government led Harold Macmillan and, briefly, Alec Douglas-Home.

This second volume picks the story up in 1964, with the formation of a new Labour government under the leadership of Harold Wilson. At first all goes well, with Britain heading into economic prosperity while the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones spread British youth culture all around the world. The title is taken from a speech by Harold Wilson in which he promised to use the white heat of Britain’s technological revolution to drive a new prosperous society.

Of course, nothing ever is quite as it seems, and economic booms seem always to be closely followed by lean times, and Wilson’s administration would certainly find itself put through the wringer as the pound collapsed and he was faced with the humiliation of having to devalue the currency, not once but twice.

There is a startling similarity between the travails with which Harold Wilson had to contend, and the difficulties encountered by the recent Conservative government as it struggled to deal in any sort of constructive manner with the Brexit crisis. The irony is that Wilson’s difficulties were in the context of repeated failure to enter the Common Market, as it was then known. His own Cabinet was riven with animosities, with the added scope for disaster of a raging alcoholic (George Brown) who seemed capable of starting a fight in an empty room, and repeatedly quarrelled and clashed with virtually all of his Cabinet colleagues at one time or another.

Dominic Sandbrook has a great knack for conveying political disputes with great clarity. He is also adept at mingling political and diplomatic history with chapters documenting social and domestic change. He analyses trends in education, domestic relationship, changing attitudes to money and employment, and even the nation’s evolving sexual mores, all in an informed and balanced manner. He writes about complicated issues with great clarity, but never compromises either his academic credentials (the book has almost two hundred pages of footnotes) or his readers’ attention.

130. Out! by Tim Shipman.

It is now more than eight years since the referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the European Union. The decision to leave has probably been the single most significant political issue in Britain throughout my lifetime, and even though it is now a few years since Boris Johnson’s government finally secured the final departure, its reverberations are still being felt.

From the outside it might seem simply to have been a fairly straightforward binary option, with followers of either side campaigning against adherents of the other. Oh, if only it had been that straightforward! This is the fourth volume in Tim Shipman’s comprehensive, and admirably non-partisan account of the Brexit story. I believe that he had initially intended that three books would be enough, but that was before the unfolding pantomime or farce of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, which have merited a separate volume of their own, to be published shortly. But even this final volume was delayed because of British political events. It had originally been scheduled for publication back in the summer of 2024, to follow very closely on the heels of the previous volume. However, Rishi Sunak’s sudden decision in May 2024 to call a general election meant that the book had to be held back for further developments to be addressed.

If I hadn’t lived through these events (and working in Whitehall, and regularly attending Parliament as part of my role as a civil servant, I found myself at times uncomfortably close to the unfolding drama), I might struggle to believe that the country that proudly considers itself to have the Mother of all Parliaments could really have been reduced to such farcical political stagnation. Shipman’s third volume followed the struggle that Theresa may’s government encountered as it tried to secure parliamentary agreement to some form of deal with the European Union. For once British xenophobia was misplaced – while the EU was legitimately negotiating to ensure that its interests weren’t unduly harmed by any deal that might eventually be agreed with the UK, Theresa May’s bitterest enemies turned out to be in Parliament, many of them in her own party.

The fourth volume picks the story up with Theresa May’s government continuing to tear itself apart over different options to try to advance a negotiated deal. Perhaps may’s problem was that she was too strictly ruled by a sense of decency. Although she had favoured remaining in the EU, on becoming Prime Minister she was determined to respect the outcome of the referendum, as a consequence of which she moved far to quickly to trigger Article 50, which set the whole juggernaut process in motion.

Unfortunately, her ability to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory also led her to call an election in 2017, in the belief that this would give her a larger parliamentary majority and enable her to push the relevant EU Exit legislation through. She misread the situation and ended up with a hung Parliament, forcing her into a political alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland MPs.

I remember being amazed at the time by May’s resilience. I don’t know how she managed to keep getting up each day and returning to the political fray. Shipman recounts how tortuous a process it was to keep coming up with new alternative suggestions for a pragmatic deal with the EU, each of which would then be shot down by either the official Opposition or, more frequently, by rebel factions within May’s own party. Eventually even that seemingly adamantine resilience was broken, and she acknowledged failure, resigning as Tory leader to enable Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister.

Now cushioned by the passage of a few years on, it still seems to stretch one’s credibility to remember that Boris was ever Prime Minister. It is also bizarre how readily one forgets some traumatic events. While the issue evoked great bitterness and seemed capable even of precipitating the country into civil war, I had forgotten about Boris attempt to prorogue Parliament, essentially suspending it to prevent it from blocking his plan to leave the EU without a deal if necessary. Shipman’s analysis of the legal arguments of that issue for both sides is very clear, rendering an exceptionally complex issue fairly accessible to the lay reader. At the time, I think that my colleagues and I felt that things couldn’t become much stranger. Little dd we know!

It is also odd to read a history of events before the COVD pandemic swept the world. How innocent those days now seem! Of course, Johnson’s premiership will probably now be remembered primarily for the ignominy with which it ended, with Johnson being deposed by his own party (a recurring trope for the British Conservatives). For most of his time in 10 Downing Street, however, his time as leader has to be viewed through the prism of Covid, with most of the world transformed through the medium of lockdown.

Politics remained chaotic, however, with Johnson initially reliant upon, but then fatally falling out with, Dominic Cummings, whom he had appointed as backroom manager at No.10. The handling of the pandemic, and the subsequent ‘Patygate’ investigations are too tedious, and potentially triggering, to dwell on at length here, but they led to Johnson’s departure, and the emergence of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, an appointment that would have stretched credulity a few years previously even further than the appointment of Johnson that preceded it.

Shipman performs admirably here, preserving his non-partisan approach, and also struggling to avoid allowing hindsight to colour his depictions. I find it harder to remained unbiased about La Truss. During her first ministerial appointment, as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education, I was briefly her Correspondence Manager. In that role I had a weekly meeting with her, at which we discussed her responses to ministerial post, but had to be introduced to her anew each time as she could not recall who I was. After this had happened four or five times, her PS exasperatedly explained, ‘He’s still your lead drafter.’ Obviously, I realise that that anecdote might be as much a reflection on my utter blandness and failure to register on her awareness, but I understand from colleagues that they all similarly failed to gain her attention.

Shipman despatches Truss fairly quickly, just as the Conservative Party did, dwelling longer on the relative stability that attended Rishi Sunak’s period at the helm. Sunak emerges as an essentially decent, but also politically naïve, man. Hardworking and capable, but lacking the sufficiently sensitive political antennae to understand the flow of public opinion. Shipman’s description of his announcement of the election, standing outside and seemingly oblivious to a monsoon-like downpour is marvellous.

Taken together, the four volumes represent a massive undertaking for the reader, but they are very rewarding. It is fascinating to read such a detailed account of such a tempestuous period.

>182 Eyejaybee: Great review, Ian. I think I'll have to read these at some point. I also attended a couple of meetings with Liz Truss and she was quite sharp with some stakeholders, talking over them and I recall at one point one of them looking at me with an invisible mental shrug on his face!

131. The Deaths by Mark Lawson.

I used to enjoy listening to Mark Lawson's Front Row programme on BBC Radio 4, and remember looking forward very eagerly to reading this novel when it first come out, although, as always in such circumstances, there was a slight fear that I might prove disappointed. Such fears were groundless, however, as Lawson definitely delivered in spades with this finely crafted novel about life in Middle England during the recent economic downturn and the Government's austerity measures.

The novel is set in the early years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government under David Cameron, and revolves around four families living in a village in the commuter belt of Buckinghamshire. Self-styled as 'The Eight', the four couples occupy the four largest houses in their village and have gradually created their own exclusive social circle. Despite their closeness, however, a degree of stratification is already evident as the novel opens. At the pinnacle of the inner society stand the Dunsters, Max and 'Jenno', whose position is supported by Dunster Manor Ltd, the family firm that Max inherited, and which makes high class diaries and calendars and similar products which have proved popular around the world. Next in line come the Crossans, Jonny and Libby. Jonny, son of a now ennobled former Tory Minister from the Thatcher and Major administrations, is a very successful barrister while Libby sits as a local magistrate and features in countless local committees. Former soldier Tom Rutherford is chief executive of his own security firm while his wife Emily is a local doctor. The fourth couple is made up of Natasha ("Tasha") and Simon Lonsdale. Tasha owns a catering company while Simon is a senior executive in a PR firm which is currently struggling to rehabilitate the image of a failed bank that had required a massive bail-out from government funds. All four couples have children who attend the same local private school, and almost all of their socialising seems to be conducted within the clique.

Alternating chapters of the story recount the discovery of a brutal mass murder in which one of the families is presumed to have been killed by the husband/father who has then shot himself. The other chapters show the lead up to this awful crisis, taking the families through a chaotic series of set pieces, each more splendidly extravagant than the last. Lawson handles this crescendo of conspicuous expenditure with great deftness, sowing clues to the startling denouement that might feasibly apply to any of the four families.

It was very reminiscent of John Lanchester's Capital (one of my favourite novels ever), with the scene transplanted from South London to rural Buckinghamshire. Lawson is just as capable as Lanchester at making telling observations about the state of the nation, and the ever-widening chasm between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' in divided Britain.

Rereading this some ten years on, the book remains sharp in its observations of society, and still supremely enjoyable.

I remember I got a copy of The Deaths based on your review when you first read it and it's still sitting on my 'to read soon' shelf giving me baleful looks. A timely reminder.

>185 mabith: I tend to shuffle past my TBR shelf … well, okay, shelves … without really looking too closely any more (usually when on my way out to buy some more books).

I don't buy all that many books, largely just things I know the library won't get or that I've already read and loved. I foolishly decided to put all the unread ones on the top shelves of my fiction and non-fiction bookcases, and they're right by my couch where I am most of the day. There are few enough I could easily get through all of them in a year and yet here we are.

132. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith.

This book was the subject of a lot of hype shortly after its initial publication arising from the apparently accidental leak of the fact that "Robert Galbraith" is a pseudonym of J K Rowling. I am very cynical about that ‘accident’. I can entirely understand why J K Rowling might want to resort to a pseudonym for a series of novels so different from the Harry Potter books that made her name and her fortune. However, with the deeply ingrained cynicism and suspicion of a former tax inspector, I imagine that her publishers were probably more reluctant to maintain the deception, and perfectly aware of the beneficial impact on sales that such a revelation would have.

I had deliberately deferred reading The Casual Vacancy, her first book for adults, although when I eventually got around to reading it I found it utterly engrossing, and very enjoyable. I had the same experience with The Cuckoo Calling.

The novel opens with the death, apparently by suicide, of Lula Landry, a supermodel who seemed to have the world at her feet: undeniable beauty, multi-million-pound fashion endorsements, luxurious and exclusive apartment and rock star boyfriend. No-one can quite understand why she might have done it, but everyone seems to accept that it was suicide: just another celebrity pushed over the edge by the pressures attendant on her high profile lifestyle. Everyone, that is, apart from her brother, John Bristow, who hires a private detective to look investigate her death.

We then learn that Lula's life had not been a bed of roses. She and John had both been adopted by the Bristows, a wealthy couple who had been unable to have children of their own. There had been a third adopted child, Charlie, but he had died while still a child (indeed, it emerges that Lula had been adopted following Charlie's death, as a form of consolation for their Mrs Bristow). In her late teens already a modelling sensation, Lula had conducted investigations and tracked down her natural mother who turned out to be an alcoholic and occasional prostitute, who went on to have three children who were all taken into care and passed on for adoption. Upon discovering that her daughter had become a successful model, the natural mother immediately sold her story to the tabloid press, thereby contributing further to the perpetual hounding that Lula suffered at the hands of the paparazzi. To add to her woes, Lula had had a series of drug-related incidents and her boyfriend, Evan Duffield, was widely known as a heroin addict.

If Lula might be viewed as ‘damaged goods’, so too is the private detective whom John Bristow retains to look into the case. Cormoran Strike is the illegitimate, and largely disowned, son of John Rokeby, a successful rock star whose career stretches back twenty or thirty years. Strike had secured a place at Oxford but following the death through heroin overdose of his mother, he chose instead to join the army where he ended up on the Special Investigation Bureau of the Military Police. On service in Afghanistan, he was caught in a roadside explosion and lost part of his leg. Now back in civilian life he has established a practice on the fringes of Soho, but is struggling to keep afloat, and has just been dumped by his fiancée.

That is the context, and it does all sound rather grim. However, Galbraith/ Rowling handles all of this with a lightness of touch that never derides the awful tragedies that the characters have suffered but ensures that the story fizzes along quite merrily. She has, after all, had her own searing experiences at the hands of the press, and suffered the unwelcome travails that accompany sudden and extensive celebrity.

The plot is very well constructed (and it certainly fooled me) and the characters are all very clearly and plausibly drawn.