Review: ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING, Evie Wyld

• first published by Jonathan Cape 2013
• this edition published by Random House Australia (Vintage) 2014
• ISBN 978-1-74275-730-8
• 229 pages
• source: my local library

Synopsis (publisher)

Winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award

Who or what is watching Jake Whyte from the woods?

Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It's just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.

It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake's unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.

Set between Australia and a remote English island, All the Birds, Singing is the story of one how one woman's present comes from a terrible past. It is the second novel from the award-winning author of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice.

My take

Strictly speaking Evie Wyld is not an Australian author, but she grew up in Australia, this novel has been published by Random House Australia, and part of the story is set in Australia. It is probably not really crime fiction, although crimes have been committed.

When Jake Whyte was a teenager in a remote Australian town she made a terrible mistake. That's the reason she is now living on a remote English island about as far away from Australia as she can get. It is almost like voluntary exile, paying for something she can't forget.

There are two stories in this novel and Jake is the joining point. The fascinating aspect is the way the novel is structured, but I'm going leave that for you to discover for yourself. The interleaving of the two stories is skilfully done, but the author does make the reader work hard, at least initially. The Australian part of the story is vivid and believable, while at the same time the remote English setting feels very authentic.

I can see why it won Australia's prestigious Miles Franklin Award in 2014.
Check the judges' notes here.

My rating: 4.9

About the author

Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and the UK. She now runs Review, a small independent bookshop in London. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 she was listed as one of the Culture Show's Best New British Novelists. She was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2013 she was listed as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Evie's second novel, All the Birds, Singing, was published in 2013. It was longlisted for the 2014 Stella Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She is the winner of the 2013 Encore Award, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the 2014 Miles Franklin Award.

Awards
2014 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award - (Shortlisted);
2014 European Union Prize for Literature - (Winner);
2014 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - (Shortlisted);
2014 Miles Franklin Award - (Winner);
2014 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize - (Winner);
2014 Encore Award - (Winner);

Review: DARKEST PLACE, Jaye Ford

• source: Random House Australia via NetGalley
• Available for Kindle (Amazon)
• File Size: 1122 KB
• Print Length: 346 pages
• Publisher: RHA eBooks Adult (February 1, 2016)
• Publication Date: January 27, 2016
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
• Language: English
• ASIN: B017J5899W

Synopsis (NetGalley)

An adrenaline-pumping suspense novel from the author of BEYOND FEAR. What if a stranger is watching you sleep - and no one believes you?

Carly Townsend is starting over after a decade of tragedy and pain. In a new town and a new apartment she's determined to leave the memories and failures of her past behind.

However that dream is shattered in the dead of night when she is woken by the shadow of a man next to her bed, silently watching her. And it happens week after week.Yet there is no way an intruder could have entered the apartment. It's on the fourth floor, the doors are locked and there is no evidence that anyone has been inside.

With the police doubting her story, and her psychologist suggesting it's all just a dream, Carly is on her own. And being alone isn't so appealing when you're scared to go to sleep .

My Take:

Australian author Jaye Ford certainly knows how to write a good thriller.

Carly Townsend moves across the country to Newcastle, NSW, to start a new life. For the last decade she has been living with the fact that she killed her three best friends. Her new apartment is on the 4th floor of a renovated warehouse. All modern. But the first thing she learns is that there is a sad story about the girl who used to own her apartment.

Carly herself is pretty fragile, the result of two failed marriages, three miscarriages, and the death of her three friends.  She thinks she has lost the outgoing personailty she once had, and wonders if she can find it again.

She begins a business course at a local TAFE and is lucky to be befriended by twenty year old with big ideas. Carly hasn't slept well for years but then she is woken in the early morning by a hooded man. She reports the home invasion to the police but by the third time they have had enough of her wasting their time.

Jaye Ford ceratinly knows which of our "fear" buttons to press.

My rating: 4.6

I've also read

4.4, BEYOND FEAR
4.5, SCARED YET?
4.5, BLOOD SECRET
4.7, ALREADY DEAD

Review: Charles Paris: MURDER UNPROMPTED, Simon Brett - BBC Radio Play

• Written by: Simon Brett, Jeremy Front
• Narrated by: Bill Nighy, full cast, Suzanne Burden
• Length: 1 hr and 51 mins 
• Radio/TV Program
• first published as a novel in 1982

Synopsis (Audible)

Bill Nighy stars as Charles Paris in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Simon Brett's novel.
Charles Paris is understudying in a West End production whose star, Michael Banks, seems unable to master the script.
Has Charles time to solve a murder, win Frances' heart and make it onstage by the time the curtain goes up?

My Take

Simon Brett's Charles Paris series are always a delight to read and a radio play featuring Bill Nighy doubles the delight. Nighy makes a very believable Charles Paris and he is well supported by Suzanne Burden as his wife Francis.

Just the thing for a relative short journey.

My rating: 4.4

I've also read
BLOOD AT THE BOOKIES
THE POISONING IN THE PUB
4.4, THE SHOOTING IN THE SHOP
4.3, SO MUCH BLOOD
4.2, A DECENT INTERVAL
4.5, BONES UNDER THE BEACH HUT
4.2, GUNS IN THE GALLERY
4.6, THE CORPSE ON THE COURT
4.3, THE STRANGLING ON THE STAGE
4.2, THE CINDERELLA KILLER
4.5, THE TOMB IN TURKEY 

What I read in February 2016

Pick of the month February 2016

I'm a bit late with this summary.

Some excellent reads as you will see from the list below:

• 4.3, MURDER ON THE HOUR, Elizabeth J. Duncan
• 4.9, WHAT SHE NEVER TOLD ME, Kate McQuaile
• 4.9, COFFIN ROAD, Peter May
• 4.7, EVEN THE DEAD, Benjamin Black
• 4.3, LOCK NO 1. Maigret #18, Georges Simenon 
• 4.4, BOGMAN, R.I. Olufsen  
• 4.4, LONDON'S GLORY, Christopher Fowler 
• 3.7, THE SANTA KLAUS MURDER, Mavis Doriel Hay
• 4.0. Agatha Christie, the Lost Plays
• 4.8, TWISTER, Jane Woodham  
• 4.5, MISSING, Melanie Casey
• 4.7, DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN, Peter Lovesey 

 My Pick of the month is WHAT SHE NEVER TOLD ME by Kate McQuaile

Here is the synopsis:
What do you do when you find out that your whole life could be a lie?

I talked to my mother the night she died, losing myself in memories of when we were happiest together. But I held one memory back, and it surfaces now, unbidden. I see a green postbox and a small hand stretching up to its oblong mouth. I am never sure whether that hand is mine. But if not mine, whose?

Louise Redmond left Ireland for London before she was twenty. Now, more than two decades later, her heart already breaking from a failing marriage, she is summoned home. Her mother is on her deathbed, and it is Louise's last chance to learn the whereabouts of a father she never knew.

Stubborn to the end, Marjorie refuses to fill in the piecesof her daughter's fragmented past. Then Louise unexpectedly finds a lead. A man called David Prescott . . . but is he really the father she's been trying to find? And who is the mysterious little girl who appears so often in her dreams? As each new piece of the puzzle leads to another question, Louise begins to suspect that the memories she most treasures could be a delicate web of lies.
See my review

See what others have chosen for Pick of the Month  

Review: SMALLBONE DECEASED, Michael Gilbert - audio book

• first published1949
• #4 in the Inspector Hazelrigg series
•  Narrated by: Michael Mcstay
• Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins 
• Unabridged Audiobook
Release Date:01-06-10
Publisher: Audible Studios

 Synopsis (Audible)

Another classic Michael Gilbert thriller, set within the legal profession. The mystery begins when the body of a client is found dead in a deed-box of the impeccable legal firm of Horniman, Birley and Crane. But why? And how was the Horniman system broken? A classic English murder mystery.

Michael Francis Gilbert ( 1912- 2006) is recognized as one of the most versatile British mystery writers. He was a lawyer in London for many years and at one point had Raymond Chandler as his client. He wrote almost every sort of mystery and thriller. He wrote police procedurals, spy novels and short stories, courtroom dramas, classical mysteries, crime novels, and almost every possible combination of these, all with the same competence and dry, detached wit.

Gilbert was a founding member of the British Crime Writers Association, Named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and was named Number 24 on The Telegraph's "50 crime writers to read before you die".

My take

When the senior partner of the firm Horniman, Birley and Crane, Abel Horniman dies, his son Bob, a war hero from the Navy, takes over his share of the partnership. Bob needs to find Mr Smallbone who is a co-trustee of one of the accounts his father managed. In addition there appears to be some money missing.  Everybody he contacts thinks that Smallbone, an avid collector of ancient artifacts, has gone off to Rome on a buying trip. The discovery of his body thus comes as a surprise although the reader always knows that he is dead from the title of the story.

Someone who has recently begun working at the firm becomes the amateur sleuth especially after there is a second death. Inspector Hazelrigg from the Yard pursues enquiries too and separately they come to the same conclusion.

This is a sort of "sifting the evidence" book, eliminating suspects one by one, but even so the author has a surprise in store for us. As the blurb says, a classic English murder mystery.

My rating: 4.1

About the author
(Michael Francis Gilbert)
(1912 - 2006)

Born in Lincolnshire in 1912, Michael Francis Gilbert was educated in Sussex before entering the University of London where he gained an LLB with honours in 1937. Gilbert was a founding member of the British Crime Writers Association, and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America - an achievement many thought long overdue. He won the Life Achievement Anthony Award at the 1990 Boucheron in London, and in 1980 he was knighted as a Commander in the Order of the British Empire. Gilbert made his debut in 1947 with Close Quarters, and since then has become recognized as one of our most versatile British mystery writers.     

Review: ENOUGH ROPE, Barbara Nadel

• First published in Great Britain by Hachette UK 2015 - Quercus
• ISBN 978-1-84866-423-4
• 377 pages
• #4 in the Hakim and Arnold series
• source: my local library

Synopsis (publisher)

Old rivalries and new threats clash in London's East End in this fourth crime novel in the Hakim & Arnold series

Private investigator and ex-soldier Lee Arnold and superintendent Paul Venus are by no means friends, but when Venus' son Harry is kidnapped and ransom demands arrive from an address in Arnold's patch in east London, the superintendent doesn't know who else to turn to.

Arnold and his partner Mumtaz Hakim soon find themselves chasing leads into several of the East End's uneasily coexisting communities. Mumtaz uncovers a link to one of the area's powerful Bangladeshi families, whose property empire has always seemed suspicious, while Arnold suspects the involvement of more old-fashioned East End gangsters, and wonders if some of the nastier rumours about Venus himself might be true. And neither Mumtaz nor Lee like the look of the children of the super-rich, arriving in droves in the trendy parts of Hoxton and Shoreditch and living in luxury just a stone's throw from grinding urban poverty.

The truth, however, is stranger and more dangerous than either Arnold or Hakim imagine. Enough Rope is a powerful and thrilling novel of London's ever-evolving dark side.

My Take

Police superintendent Paul Venus and his wife are separated and have tried to compensate by sending their teenage son Harry to an exclusive boy's boarding school. Now it appears that Harry has been kidnapped and the first ransom demand has arrived. The parents are told to raise the money quickly and not to involve the police. Venus does not know who to turn to and calls an old colleague, ex-policeman, private investigator Lee Arnold who runs his business in the East End.

The main story of the novel is the kidnapping and the efforts to locate Harry. Venus and his wife Tina are able to raise and deliver the ransom, but then a second demand arrives. This is money they just don't have and Venus turns to a known gangster for funds. And then comes the third demand. Days are passing and gradually Arnold develops an idea of who is behind the demands.

Meanwhile his partner Mumtaz Hakim pursues other investigations. One is the search for her mother by a middle-aged woman who has now developed Huntingdon's who was left in a local phone box as a baby.  The baby was taken to a local convent but it appears that the nuns there had more idea of the child's mother than they revealed at the time.

A third plot strand explores a protection racket being run by one of the East End's powerful Bangladeshi families. Mumtaz Hakim has personal knowledge of their activities and is doing her best to protect her daughter Shazia from their reach.

This novel draws a fascinating snapshot of the mixed culture of this area of London. It was a refreshing change from police procedurals.

My rating: 4.7

About the author

In addition to her Hakim and Arnold crime series set in east London, Barbara Nadel is the author of the Ikmen crime novels, set in Turkey. Born in London's East End, Barbara now lives in Essex.


Hakim and Arnold Mystery
1. A Private Business (2012)
2. An Act of Kindness (2013)
3. Poisoned Ground (2014)
4. Enough Rope (2015)



Cetin Ikmen
1. Belshazzar's Daughter (1999)
2. A Chemical Prison (2000)
     aka The Ottoman Cage
3. Arabesk (2001)
4. Deep Waters (2002)
5. Harem (2003)
6. Petrified (2003)
7. Deadly Web (2005)
8. Dance With Death (2006)
9. A Passion for Killing (2007)
10. Pretty Dead Things (2007)
11. River of the Dead (2009)
12. Death by Design (2010)
13. A Noble Killing (2011)
14. Dead of Night (2012)
15. Deadline (2013)
16. Body Count (2014)
17. Land of the Blind (2015)
18. On the Bone (2016)

Crime Fiction Pick of the Month February 2016

Crime Fiction Pick of the Month 2016

Many crime fiction bloggers write a summary post at the end of each month listing what they've read, and some, like me, even go as far as naming their pick of the month.

This meme is an attempt to aggregate those summary posts.
It is an invitation to you to write your own summary post for February 2016, identify your crime fiction best read of the month, and add your post's URL to the Mr Linky below.
If Mr Linky does not appear for you, leave the URL in a comment and I will add it myself.

You can list all the books you've read in the past month on your post, even if some of them are not crime fiction, but I'd like you to nominate your crime fiction pick of the month.

That will be what you will list in Mr Linky too -
e.g.
ROSEANNA, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo - MiP (or Kerrie)

You are welcome to use the image on your post and it would be great if you could link your post back to this post on MYSTERIES in PARADISE.

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