 Septuagenarian sleuth Judith Potts and her two middle-aged sidekicks Suzie Harris and Becks Starling find themselves drawn into another Marlow murder mystery in the fourth installment of this much loved cozy crime series.
There is trouble brewing at the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society (MADS). Oliver Berestford, a divisive figure among the players, has organised a boat trip on the Marlow Belle, a snazzy vintage cruiser with cabins below. Only a select few have been chosen to attend the trip: Verity, Oliver’s wife, Lizzie, a former MADS member but now famous actress, Toby, a protege and Duncan, an old friend. When half way through the trip Oliver goes missing, it’s a complete mystery as to what has happened. His body is later found washed up with two bullet holes. What on earth could have happened to him? More to the point, who was out to get him? The fourth book in The Marlow Murder Club series is great page-turning fun. Robert Thorogood’s ability to write a compelling whodunnit, shot through with wit, humour and heart, shows no sign of flagging. The twists and turns in the story, coupled with the wonderful characters - the pushy Judith, the blunt and outspoken dog walker Suzie and the prim and proper vicar’s wife Becks - make for a brilliant entertainment. The final set piece - with the ultimate crime reveal happening in the middle of a production of The Importance of Being Earnest - is clever and just a bit mad. Admittedly some aspects of the story stretch credulity, yet the overall journey is so enjoyable that these minor quibbles can be overlooked. An irresistible romp with an endearing cast of characters. Murder on the Marlow Belle, by Robert Thorogood. Published by HQ Fiction. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A talking umbrella with magic powers finds his forever home.
When a muddle-headed wizard unwittingly bungles a spell, he brings to life an umbrella. Pernickety Boo - a talking dog’s head attached to an umbrella canopy - finds himself abandoned by the forgetful wizard to a lost property depot. He languishes there for several years until he meets Sally Moonshine, a young girl who takes an immediate liking to Pernickety Boo. He moves in with Sally and her two Mums, meeting several interesting characters along the way, notably the cat Jimjam and a horse named Crackers. Pernickety and Sally experience many adventures, especially once Pernickety figures out how to use his time travelling skills. But danger looms when brattish Billy Turpin decides he wants Pernickety Boo for himself. Best selling children’s author Sally Gardner has written a winning story full of whimsy and clever nonsense. Think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. All of the novel’s interlocking parts shouldn’t really work - a talking umbrella that even the adults see as perfectly normal, talking cats that performed as circus acts in previous lives, plus a host of other absurdities - yet Sally Gardner has the magic touch and creates a bubbly, effervescent tonic out of this seeming chaos. A book sure to delight young and old readers alike. Pernickety Boo, by Sally Gardner. Published by HarperCollins. $19.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A steady stream of strangers straighten out their lives while travelling the Hankyu Train Line.
In the author’s preface to Hiro Arikawa’s The Passengers of the Hankyu Line, we learn that Hankyu is a private railway that services the area around Kyoto in Japan. Arikawa concentrates her story on the Imazu Line, a lesser known line within Hankyu. A loose collection of characters bump into and interact with each other as they commute on the line, sometimes their fates coming to intertwine. Shoko is dealing with the grief of being a jilted bride. Misa, a student, is having trouble with her violent boyfriend. Tokie and her granddaughter discuss the merits of getting a dog. Kei’ichi in an accidental encounter meets Miho and the two tentatively move towards a relationship. Yasue, a housewife unhappy with her friendship circle, decides to step back from their expensive outings and lunches to concentrate on her family. First published in 2008 and now translated into English by Allison Markin Powell, The Passengers on the Hankyu Line is a gently written novel about everyday lives and where they intersect in public places. If there’s a theme, you could say it’s the kindness of strangers. Sometimes people behave badly in public - there are scenes of loud school girls and boisterous women grabbing seats - but in the long run humanity tends towards kindness and loving relationships. A pleasurable, companionable read that will make you feel that despite life’s troubles, all is good with the world. The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, by Hiro Arikawa. Published by Doubleday. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Simone de Beauvoir published her final novel Les Belle Images (“Beautiful Images”) in 1966, and it was translated into English in 1968 by Patrick O’Brian. It is here given a new translation by Lauren Elkin and a reworked title, The Image of Her.
Laurence works as a copywriter, promoting products that make middle class life comfortable. She has a near perfect husband and two young daughters. While there is some friction caused in her personal life by having a lover on the side, this is resolved without too much drama by calling the whole relationship off. All should be well, but something keeps niggling at Laurence, a dreadful feeling of impending doom. At one point she wonders if she will always have this feeling of “stones in her chest and sulfurous clouds in her head.” She watches wars on the television and reads about disasters in newspapers while safely cocooned at home. It doesn’t seem right, but such is the communications technology of modern life. While Laurence tries to keep her emotional boat from capsizing, she finds trouble brewing in her family. Her mother, Dominique, is having trouble with her second husband. He has decided to leave her for a younger woman, causing Dominique to go into a full meltdown. And closer to home, her ten-year-old daughter, Catherine, has confessed to feeling despair at the state of the world. Her husband insists on therapy for their daughter as a stock standard response, but Laurence feels differently, in the end quite vehemently, that despair is the only rational response to the world. Written in crystal clear prose and superbly organised, Simone de Beauvoir triumphs in creating the literary version of a panic attack. We watch as the protagonist, Laurence, feels herself slowly swallowed up and suffocated by life’s cruelty and carelessness. Friends and family tax her emotionally with their suffering, while she hopelessly tries to forge her own path ahead, to escape their folly. At one stage she thinks her easy-going, philosophical father is the model to emulate, but she ultimately finds his peace of mind is built on illusions and self-deceptions. Wonderfully absorbing, and written with a genius’s uncanny gift, The Image of Her is a rare literary experience. The Image of Her, by Simone de Beauvoir. Published by Vintage. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  A funny and poignant look at the lives of American retail workers.
Town Square is a big box store in upstate New York, one that sells everything from organic food to electronics. Team Movement is a group of employees who unpack and put out on display all of the store’s goods. It’s an arduous job, involving lots of lifting and running around the store. The hours are not good and conditions worse. Work is precarious, with employees always after more hours, while finding their entitlements and perks being eroded over time. There is lots of bitching and sniping among the workers as they strive, uselessly, to try and improve their lot. At one stage in the novel, as the workers plot, they even laugh uproariously at the hopeless idea of starting a union. An opportunity to improve workplace conditions happens when the hated middle manager, Meredith, is slated for promotion. The members of Team Movement plot to get her advanced. The idea is that if Meredith is promoted to Store Manager, they can get her of their backs. Spearheading this effort is Val, a plucky go-getter. She signs everyone up to the plan to give excellent feedback about Meredith’s performance when corporate’s head honchos visit the store to conduct employee interviews, and also decide to sabotage her rival Anita’s chances for the position. (Her display work is ruthlessly messed up before the corporate visit.). There is one dissenter, the surly Nicole, who thinks Meredith should die in a ditch. But eventually she too is convinced to come on board. Val’s strategy is on course to succeed, when things suddenly go pear shaped. Milo, an efficient worker with anger management issues, decides to tell corporate that Meredith is a drug pusher (she offers caffeine tablets during the night shifts). The corporate interviewers become alarmed and must get to the bottom of things. Further complications are thrown into the mix when a store manager also has some interesting revelations about Meredith. Help Wanted is Adelle Waldman’s second novel. Her first, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., appeared in 2013. Waldman did a stint as a night worker at a big box store and turned her experiences into a novel. What she offers here is a witty and perceptive satire on modern corporate America, taking a scalpel to crushing contemporary workplace culture. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments and clever zingers. While Help Wanted most certainly presents a theatre of the ridiculous, there is a deeply humane undercurrent. All of Team Movement’s workers are given fully fleshed out back stories, dealing with lost love, rejection, financial struggles, the difficulties of raising children while working multiple jobs, and the constant drumbeat of money troubles. As someone who has worked in the corporate world, I can attest to the book’s psychological accuracy: the manipulation, spin and stress. There is an aura of terrible impotence as the workers try to improve their lot, the irony being that they decide to try and get someone they hate promoted, while laughing off any idea of starting a union. Help Wanted explains the desperate lives of America’s poorly paid workers, showing how the middle class has been hollowed out. Given the current grievances of America’s poor and overworked, it probably goes someway to explaining Trumpism. A startling portrait of corporate America and how it crushes people. Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman. Published by Serpent's Tail. $24.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Twilight Sleep is a 1927 novel by American writer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Edith Wharton. It is here republished in a lovely new jacket by Smith & Taylor Classics.
Pauline Manford is married to Dexter Manford, and they have a daughter, Nona. Pauline also has a son, Jim, by a previous husband, Arthur Wyant. Jim is married to the flighty flapper girl, Lita, who is growing restless with her marriage. Much concern in the family circles around keeping this marriage together. At the head of these efforts is the indomitable Pauline, who has endless reserves of energy and optimism. However, despite Pauline’s outward exuberance, her wellbeing is heavily reliant on a mixture of wellness treatments and popular self-help strategies from an army of personal gurus. While much of the family’s focus is on Jim and Lita’s marriage, the eminently sensible daughter Nona is having private troubles of her own. She is in love with Stanley Heuston, an unhappily married man whose wife won’t allow a divorce. Living in the midst of so much material comfort, a deep irony is at play as Nona finds her life spiritually empty. While mostly satirical in tone, the story builds up to a violent climax that leaves Wharton’s cast of characters stumbling around for answers, but unable to find any. Reading through this 100 year old novel, it’s striking how closely it echoes many of today’s fad and obsessions. The action focuses on affluent middle-class life, and how the very well off spend (or waste) their time. Wharton’s razor sharp observations of the vanities and inanities of the rich almost reads as a companion piece to American philosopher Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), a book that dissected middle class tastes, manners and self delusions. The novel’s main theme, it could be argued, is how the idle rich spend their time pursuing useless busy work. Many times in the text Wharton has her characters lament how empty days spent trying to relax only results in more stress. “Certainly, no amount of "mental deep-breathing," and all the other exercises in serenity, could combat the nervous apprehension produced by this breathless New York life. Today she really felt it to be too much for her: she leaned back and closed her lids with a sigh. But she was jerked back to consciousness by the traffic-control signal, which had immobilized the motor just when every moment was so precious. The result of every one's being in such a hurry to get everywhere was that nobody could get anywhere. She looked across the triple row of motors in line with hers, and saw in each (as if in a vista of mirrors) an expensively dressed woman like herself, leaning forward in the same attitude of repressed impatience, the same nervous frown of hurry on her brow." "Oh, if only she could remember to relax!” A witty and rather savage portrait of American wealth in the 1920s. Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton. Published by Smith and Taylor Classics. $29.99 Book review by Chris Saliba  Gay Marris gives murder the comedy-horror treatment in this entertaining debut.
It’s 1960s, Swinging London. Atbara Avenue is a cosy yet nosy street, one where everyone knows everyone else’s business, built towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. At one end there is a corner shop and at the other a church, St Francis in the Fields. The street has become somewhat gaudy in its aspect, as contemporary decorative fashions, with all their ephemeral novelties, have taken prominence. Despite its surface calm, Atbara Avenue is soon shocked by the apparent suicide death of Pauline Dollimore, unhappy daughter of faded songbird Muriel Dollimore, with whom she lived. As the story progresses, we are introduced to more unusual characters - a set of rival twins, a local beauty who goes missing, a weird girl who collects animals - many of whom meet untimely deaths. Weaving in and out of this bizarre cast is the stiff-upper-lip vicar’s wife Deidre O’Reilly, and her eternally bemused husband, Desmond. They remain cheerful and untouched by the subterranean oozings and slitherings of Atbara Avenue, carrying on their trivial, self-satisfied life while the worst of human depravity unfolds around them. A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder is English author Gay Marris’s debut novel. (Interestingly Marris is a retired scientist with an interest in insect ecology and parasites.) The book doesn’t work so much as a novel, rather it’s more a collection of bizarre tales, with well drawn characters and compelling plot lines. The only continuing thread is the indomitable vicar and his wife, steady in their unflappable foolishness. Gay Marris’s crime debut is a total original, almost a Gothic comedy-horror. The best analogy is perhaps the novels of American Shirley Jackson, noted for their macabre yet comic tone. A delicious treat for those with a wicked sense of humour. A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder, by Gay Marris. Published by Bedford Square Fiction. $32.99 Review by Chris Saliba  When three school boys drown in a freak accident, a local community goes looking for a scapegoat.
Grace Disher is employed at an all boys Catholic School. As Outdoor Education teacher she is in charge of a school excursion to Juliet Beach, a notoriously volatile coastal stretch in Victoria. Three boys from the group - Jake, Harry and Roberto - take it upon themselves to strip off and run into the sea, for what reason no one knows. Before Grace can stop the boys, they are gone, swept out to sea. The remaining boys are instructed to keep quiet, until further notice, but immediately start sending messages to the outside world. Before Grace can properly grasp what has happened, the media have been alerted, and worse, social media has prematurely judged events. Grieving parents and an internet spiralling out of control turn the blame directly on Grace, who soon finds her own safety is at risk. Three Boys Gone is the debut thriller from author Mark Smith. The novel has a compellingly realistic tone and addresses key issues such as workplace misogyny, trial by social media and outdated Catholic School social attitudes. The story quickly builds to an unexpected shock-horror climax, as Grace must evade someone intent on doing her harm. A genuine page-turner confronting urgent contemporary themes. Three Boys Gone, by Mark Smith. Published by Macmillan Australia. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba  Andrea Goldsmith confronts life’s big questions.
Three lives are at the crossroads. Adrian is an academic who specialises in the study of death. His partner of ten years, Irene, has left him and he quietly struggles to reorient his life. Kezi, neighbour and friend to Adrian, is a young artist, rejected by her fundamentalist Christian family because of her sexuality. And finally there is Laura, an accomplished town planner, who has married a self-assured yet vacuous man. Her husband Tony’s intellectual brilliance is based more in his insecurities than natural perspicacity. She genuinely loves him, but constantly finds herself walking on eggshells around his oversized ego. One day a chance meeting brings Laura and Adrian together, and they realise they have academic interests in common. As an intimacy grows between the two - they meet for regular lunches on a bench in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens - Laura is drawn more into Adrian’s world, and is eventually introduced to his friend, Kezi. A close knit friendship group grows between the three and is solidified when a tragedy strikes. Andrea Goldsmith’s Melbourne-centric novel, The Buried Life, is an immersive, slow moving study of love, friendship, music and poetry. The novel concentrates on middle-class, academic lives, people living and working in Melbourne’s inner city, yet every character is easily recognisable. An entirely satisfying and sympathetic portrait of everyday lives, one that plumbs the depths of the soul. The Buried Life, by Andrea Goldsmith. Published by Transit Lounge. $34.99 Book review by Chris Saliba  The second novel in Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries series.
It’s 1919, Ukraine. There is much upheaval in the capital city, Kyiv, as the political fallout from World War I is felt. Most notably, the Russian secret police, or Cheka, wields its arbitrary yet terrifying power. Employed as a policeman by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia, Samson Kolechko has been assigned a peculiar case. He must investigate the slaughter of a pig and the selling of its parts as meat. Apparently, and no one seems to know this, the selling of meat is now deemed illegal. Higher up bureaucrats call it “speculating”, a nefarious capitalist practice. Samson’s investigations lead him into all sorts of strange encounters in Kyiv’s back alleys and underground markets. While these Byzantine inquiries are going on, Samson, who is a young man, is trying to get on with his personal life. He intends to marry his fiancee, Nadezhda, who has troubles of her own working as a census taker. Andrey Kurkov is considered one of Ukraine’s finest contemporary writers, and it’s not difficult to see why, going by this second installment of the author’s “Kyiv Mysteries” series. The novel is permeated with a wonderfully earthy tone, full of detailed descriptions of Ukrainian life in 1919. There are many memorable scenes: Red Army soldiers that mysteriously vanish at a sauna, an eccentric atheistic wedding and buffoonish interrogation lessons, where students are told how to blow smoke in a subject's face. The Stolen Heart has a rich vein of humour that runs through it, as we follow the naive Samson’s bungling in his strenuous attempts to keep his superiors happy. But beneath this comic surface there lies the grinding, tectonic plates of state, a bloodthirsty and mindless government bureaucracy inexorably taking its victims. The final scenes of the novel are shocking, where Samson is forced to make a terrible decision. It’s hard to imagine you’ll read a better novel this year. A richly absorbing tale of the absurdity and terror that is totalitarian government. The Stolen Heart, by Andrey Kurkov. Published by MacLehose Press. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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