Three mysteries of different types: Book Reviews

Among more serious books, I have been churning through mystery reads in my summer break, because they are generally fun for me (although the less-great ones are not as much so!) Here are three that I did enjoy, all very different in type, but all, I think, good exemplars of their kind.

This is a reverse thriller, which is an interesting way to construct the story. Beginning at the end (or close to the end), it goes backwards in time to the events in the past that led up to final moment. In a nutshell, it is the life story of literature academic, Thom, and his poet and arts administrator wife, Wendy. It takes the reader from the end of their life together all the way back to when they first met, aged 14, through all the things that happened along the way (exactly none of which I am going to name, as every single one is a spoiler!)

There's no doubt about its cleverness, and Swanson always writes very well, but something about the reverse structure took a lot of the sting out of the reveals for me, as most of them (all but one, or potentially one and a half) I had worked out simply by virtue of knowing where we ended up and intuiting what had likely led to that point. One of my criteria for thrillers is "do I feel compelled to keep reading to find out what happens", and on that metric, this is at best a C+ effort for me - I wasn't tempted to abandon it, but I was also not propelled along with bated breath.

That said, I thought the character work was impressive, albeit depressing, as was the detailed portrait of a long marriage that forms the guts of the story. I ended the book deciding that both Thom and Wendy - both of whom were vividly realised - were dreadful people who thoroughly deserved bad outcomes, and the lack of any protagonist I could cheer for was a bit deflating. In particular, the passage where Thom justifies himself and his actions on the basis of being A Very Special Boy Who Deserves Extraordinary Things to Happen to Him was genuinely repellent, and made me actively hate him.

On balance, I did enjoy the book, and I would recommend it to thriller and mystery fans, but I don't think it'll absolutely blow anyone away due to the constraints imposed (maybe inevitably) by the structure. I give it a solid 7, maybe 7.5, out of 10.

This is an excellent, atmospheric, chilling and intelligent fictionalisation of a true crime story from 1850s Scotland. Based on the murders of his mother, father and aunt by poor day labourer, Angus McPhee, it is told by one of his surviving brothers, Malcolm, who is also NQR in ways that are chillingly similar to Angus.

It's a clever, depressing and convincing little book. It interrogates poverty, mental illness, social shunning, and even familial / genetic dysfunction in a compelling way, and is saturated in time and place enough to feel like a fictive window into the past (in this, it had shades of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, one of my favourite novelisitic interpretations of a historical true crime ever written). Every word held me in place and time.

I think it's perhaps not quite as good as Burnett's Booker-nominated novel, His Bloody Project, which I absolutely loved, but really only because the novella length imposes some restrictions on what can be done. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend to historical crime fanciers, and I give it 8 - 8.5/10.

Here we have another stunner in the Sparks & Bainbridge series, which has become one of my favourite of all the detective series being written currently (although the setting is not contemporary, as the time of the action is 1947, but I am always a bit of sucker for postwar milieu novels - anything set from 1946 to the mid-60s as a framing is usually my jam).

Iris and Gwen remain their original selves, and both are key to the story, although, if the books are divided into Iris stories and Gwen stories, this is indisputably an Iris story. Her war activities have been central to earlier books, but this one delves deeper and earlier, back to her university days and the shadows that lie inky and long across them.

The plot is darker in some very material ways than previous books, but it felt like an appropriate turn for the series. I really like that Montclair doesn't resile from engaging with the moral failings of her protagonists (in this case Iris, and the failings are profound ones), and the ways in which their pasts come back to haunt them. And at the end lies not a cheap redemption, but an advance in understanding of who they are and what made them, which is perhaps the most you can ask from confronting your demons.

Can't wait for next one! 8.5/10