THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER

 

The year is 1634. The greatest detective in the world, Sammy Pipps, is being hauled in chains and manacles from Batavia (modern Jakarta, in Java, East Indies) to Amsterdam, to be executed for the crime of spying for the English.

His acolyte and guard, the hugely built mercenary soldier, Arent Hayes, sits miserably in the rowboat beside him, watching the East Indiaman Saardam as they get near.  To him, it seems huge, a towering construction, far too large to float. To us, it would seem about the size of a modern ferry, and it certainly was no cruise ship.

Strange things have happened already.  On the wharf, a ghostly leper with his tongue cut out still manages to croak a warning, seconds before he is mysteriously set on fire. A satanic sign appears on the first sail to be set, drawn in ash. The ship, obviously, is haunted, and probably doomed.  Sailing on the Saardam looks a lot like a death warrant.

There are strange people on board, as well.  There is Sara, the defiant and badly beaten wife of the Governor General of Batavia, who is also carrying his mistress, the seductively beautiful Creesjie Jens, who is Sara's best friend.  The captain, Crauwels, is an ambitious fop who appears to have been bought.  There is the obsequious chamberlain, who has secrets of his own, along with a hidden lust for Creesjie.  And then there is the crew, a surly, superatitious bunch, led by a sadist riven with guilt for past atrocities, and a dwarf. Too, there are the musketeers, vicious and murderous to a man.  

And, despite it all, the Saardam sets sail, accompanied by six ships in an illfated convoy.

Though the author did not know it was going to happen, it was quite a challenge for him to be read and reviewed by a maritime historian. I've been on board the replica Half Moon and sailed a short way on the replica of the little Duyfken on Darling Harbour, so I guess I know my stuff, having read a lot of technical books as well.  I was highly pleased to find he got most things right -- the dampness, the smells of slowly rotting spices, the crowded decks, the mutinous seamen who anticipated pirates, storms, ghastly illness, horrible rations, and slimy drinking water, men who defecated over the side, and pissed into tubs so they could soak their greasy slops. And, in the style of the time, as well as of the sea, riven by dark superstitions.

I did get a little tired of them dropping anchor every night in the open sea, but the author confessed that though he had done his research, he had happily discarded anything that didn't suit his plot. The captains (and crews) did refuse to sail at night, so though they hauled the ships aback a different way, it was easy to forgive Stuart Turton.  He had his reasons and was open and honest about them.  So, okay.

To tell the utter truth, I loved this book.  The plot, with its ghostly leper haunting the ship, the hoarse whispers from the hull promising the crew magnificent rewards if they did dreadful things, was both crazy and compelling.  The wellknown superstitious nature of the era certainly helped, but it was mostly carried along by the wonderfully drawn and complex characters. Sara and Arent were particularly wonderful, but another favorite was Sara's daughter, Lia, a prodigy who was not allowed to reveal her genius because she was a girl.

A page-turner, definitely.  Read it.  And don't neglect to read the author's acknowledgements and notes, which are the most amusing I have ever perused, along with his Apology to History, and Boats, which fully explains any maritime lapses he made. 

A FEAST OF FOOD AND FAMILY REMINISCENCES

 

Every American recovering from a Thanksgiving Dinner will relate to this ...

Anyone could've told you with their eyes shut what food they'd eat: Marlon's potato dish, a roast chicken and Bufty's bread, its cosy scent reaching out to greet you; Judy's rice salad; Rita's tabbouleh, flecked with mint and parsley from the garden; splintered wedges of Sissy's spinach and mushroom filo pie; minted new potatoes; sliced cucumbers in white vinegar; tomato wedges, red as the approaching sunset.

This is not America.  It is New Zealand in the Spring, not the Fall, and this is Hood's Landing by Laura Vincent, a writer who is creating waves Downunder.

The setting is a festival dinner, arranged and organized by the family matriarch, a ritual that is going to reveal hidden secrets as plates are removed and more food set out on the table. The family is relaxed ... except for one, who is bracing herself to confide her diagnosis of cancer. Thus, while she waits, the idle chat and lazy debates turn into something more meaningful.  As the reunion evolves and unravels, shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together come to light, sometimes with shock effect, other times with humor.

There is much about food, which for me was an outstanding feature of the book.  Laura Vincent is a very popular food blogger, and the author of a book, Hungry and Frozen, that features most grabbable recipes. (All of them have ingredients translated into the American version, if that helps!)  Hood's Landing is her debut novel, and is reaping rave reviews in her home country.

Well worth a read. Laura Vincent loves her words, and casts them at her readers like a shower of rose petals.  Enjoy.   

A USEFUL IDIOT

 

Dame Stella Rimington was the Director General of MI5, appointed in 1992, the first woman to hold that post. After retiring in 1996, she wrote a memoir, Open Secret, which was published in 2001.  Authorship apparently appealed, as she launched a mystery series with the first called At Risk, published in 2004.

Up until now, I have found that eminent people who turn to fiction don't do it very well, but I picked up The Hidden Hand hoping that the well-informed background of the writer would make it interesting.  And I was proved right.  While the writing is more reminiscent of Mary Stewart than say, Simon Kernick, the inside details of the world of espionage are both convincing and fascinating.

An inside term that stood out for me is "useful idiot."  I've come across a few of those over the years, but not in the spying arena. The character given this appellation is particularly well drawn within a cast of surprisingly well-cast characters.  He is Professor Arthur Cole, who over a teaching and diplomatic career based in Hong Kong, developed a passion for ancient Chinese ceramics. This led to many explorations of the interior of China, while he amassed a huge collection (of mostly insigificant stuff, but with a few fine examples), and which drew the interest of the government of the People's Republic. 

When he was offered a Fellowship at St. Felix's College in Oxford, Chinese officialdom privately encouraged him to take it up. Even more importantly, they gave him permission to take his cherished collection back to England.  Thus, when little requests were made to encourage Chinese students to attend, he readily agreed.  And so, over time, he became that useful idiot.

When the good professor floated the idea of establishing a Chinese institute within the college, an endowment miraculously arrived. And so did the students, many fully financed by their government.  Spies and enforcers came with them, unconvincingly disguised as mere students. Professor Cole should have realized that he was getting in too deep, but when one of the students complains that someone was snooping through his apartment and his research notes, the "useful idiot" merely reports the student to his handlers.  And when the student vanishes, banished to the nether regions of his homeland, Cole does not turn a hair.

Then a particularly interesting student arrives.  Her name is Li Min. Her brilliance in the field of Artificial Intelligence is outstanding, particularly in the creation of deep fake videos. 

This made the background of the novel even more intriguing.  And worrying, too. In deepfakery, a film can be made with previously recorded images and dialogue that is so convincing that it is impossible to believe it is fake. It would be possible to stage a kidnapping, for instance, with a ransom note that demands to be paid. Or a victim could be featured in a video that seems to prove that he or she is committing a major crime like treason. 

And this is what is intended for the American daughter of a senior scientist in the Department of Defence, who is a major player in the management of the current confrontation between China and the West in the South China Sea.  Shown a video that seems to prove that his daughter is spying for the Chinese, he could be coerced into giving up secrets that would help the Chinese side.

Li Min is the unknowing patsy in this scheme. Yanked from her happy research at Harvard to the much less welcoming institute in Oxford, she mentions her dissatisfaction to a woman who happens to be a friend of Manon Tyler, an operative with the CIA. Intrigued by what she is told, and suspecting Chinese infiltration into the college, Manon goes to Oxford, and joins the college by pretending to be an archivist. (The background to this is excellent, too, as Remington was once an archivist herself.) And so the story evolves, with spies, enforcers, confrontations, a kidnapping, and that very troubling deepfakery.

Altogether, a most interesting read. Recommended.

REAL CHARACTERS IN A REAL WORLD

 

I first came across the literary works of Abby Geni when her agent (who is also my agent) gave me a copy of The Lightkeepers over a delightful lunch when I was passing through New York. Laura was pretty sure I would like it, first because it is maritime, and secondly because it involves the wildlife of the sea.  She was right.  I loved it.

What I found remarkable, apart from the vivid descriptions of sharks, seals, whales, and seagulls, was the lucidness of the character descriptions.  The chief protagonist, Miranda, is a wildlife photographer who has opted to spend a year on the Farallon Islands, a bleak archipelogo of rocks beset by harsh seas off California. She becomes so familiar that it seems it would be easy to recognize her in the street.

Her fellow scientists, an odd assortment of obsessed and strange people, are equally strongly drawn. Added to that are a compulsive prologue, a murder and a convoluted mystery, plus an awe-inspiring (though hostile) background, which made this book an absolute pageturner.  Obviously, I had to read more of her work.

My next was The Wildlands, which turned out to be equally compelling, but a rather different book. A small family in a small town in Oklahoma has lost everything in a tornado. The four children, Darlene, Jane, Cora, and Tucker, cower in the basement bunker in the storm, and emerge to find they are orphaned and penniless. The farm that sustained the family is devastated, and the body of their father can't even be found. 

Darlene, the oldest at the age of 18, works to support her young siblings. Giving up her dreams of college, she has a parttime job in a local store, but this is not enough for food and shelter. Desperate, she sells the story of the unluckiest family in Oklahoma to whatever news outlet will pay, and accumulates enough to buy a delapidated trailer. And so the dreary fight for existence drags on, while Tucker acts more and more strangely. Without logic, he calls the publicity that Darlene invited improper. Then, after a huge row about it, he vanishes.

A few years later, he arrives at the trailer gravely wounded. A cosmetics factory was blown up in an act of sabotage, and somehow he was involved in it. Nine-year-old Cora is the one who finds him, and helps him treat his wounds. At the same time he coerces her into sharing his obsession for saving animals from the depravity of man.  They abscond together, and travel the country in a series of stolen cars, while he commits more acts of sabotage, including murder, and Darlene is desperately trying to track them down.

Like The Lightkeepers, it is a page-turner.  The story is remarkable, but it is the quality of the writing that shines the most.  The sensational climax could have descended into black humor, but is held tight by the talent of the creator. The ending, too, could have been cozy-cute, but conveys a message, instead. 

A most thought-provoking book, a revelation of the traps that lurk in the deeps of the best-intentioned of obsessions.

Short story collections are hard to review, and this one particularly so.  Each and every story deserves a review of its own. Because of this it is a slow read, as the ending of each essay compels the reader to sit back and think.

There are biology-based stories, which of course appealed to me. "The Rapture of the Deep," the first story, has a background of wildlife research, much like the setting of The Lightkeepers.  In this case, sharks -- and the remarkable courage of a woman who is so in love with her job that she returns to shark tagging after nearly losing her life to a tiger shark. The title story (which is the last) is about an entomologist who studies insects on decaying cadavers. It comes with fascinatingly well researched biological details, but perhaps more importantly, the protagonist is in a longterm, very happy lesbian relationship that is being threatened from without. So naturally there is a murder.

Gender identification and gender roles is a common theme in this collection, and very well handled indeed. In "Across, Beyond, Through," a devoted father is coping with the realisation that his teenaged daughter wishes to be a boy. In "Porcupines in Trees" a woman in a happy lesbian relationship struggles with a profound depression that she cannot understand. In "Mother, Wife, Sister, Daughter" a girl is taxed with the blatant failure of her father to act as a father was expected to behave. 

There is variety, however. In "A Spell for Disappearing" a woman who is being stalked and courted by a plausible money-stealing crook solves her dilemma with witchcraft. In "Love in Florida" there is a man whose first love appeals for him to visit the prison where she is incarcerated. In "The First Rule of Natalie" a young girl is convinced that her autistic sister is a Selkie. And there are others. Probably my favorite -- ""Petrichor" -- is about a woman who loses all six senses in the Covid epidemic.

All are explorations of the depths of human nature, and all are worth reading. You will need to take your time, but will be well rewarded.   

A MONSTER AND THE SEA

 

It seems years since I have picked up a book that I could not put down.  Yesterday was a first for quite a while - and well timed, too, as Wellington was locked down with a red weather warning.

I picked up To the Sea in the library because of the title.  Anything maritime rings an instant bell with me. The blurb was enticing, too.  Skeletons and family secrets and people telling lies to keep those secrets are definitely come-hither stuff.  I had never heard of the writer, Nikki Crutchley, (though I should have, as she was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh) but what the hell. And definitely no regrets.

It's a brilliant book, brilliantly written, and instantly compelling.  The prologue, with its detailed description of a particularly sadistic way of shifting a human being out of this life and into the sea, was both creepy and fascinating. It made up the first few pages of what turned out to be an absolute page-turner.

Set on a remote clifftop in rural New Zealand, Illuka is a small family farm run by an extremely reclusive group, comprised of grandfather, daughter, granddaughter, son and son's partner.  All have names derived from the sea -- not their real names, but bestowed in a forced baptism by the extremely deluded and dangerous grandfather. He rules with the kind of merciless rod that reminds one of a particularly nasty evangelical sect, but his religion is not Christ -- his god is the sea. Mentally and physically damaged after the upsetting of his boat in a storm, he now believes with soul, body and heart that he belongs to the watery goddess, and reckons that so does his small, beaten down family.

That said, his daughter hangs onto the same strange belief, and treats her own daughter, teenaged Ana, with the same singleminded ferocity.  Ana is properly subdued, but then a young, attractive journalist, Nikau, arrives, and upsets the apple basket with his pointed queries.  And what he is after is the story of murder that he believes the family is hiding.

It is not the only murder. The sacrifice to the sea described in the prologue is by no means the only skeleton in this family closet. And, in this remarkable psychological thriller, every character is in acute danger of being a sacrifice too.

Thoroughly recommended.  I will be looking for more books by this very promising writer.  

GUNS AND YOGA ... AND OLD GLORY

 

Tommy loved that flag ...

Never once had he looked at it as a fantasy in which to lose himself. It was a responsibility, not a birthright, a glorious promise forever falling short, the best impossible dream man had ever dreamed. ... That flag would endure despite every lie thrown at her and every corruption set forth in her name. Her covenant was greater than that, a promise to heal and gather in the face of every last thing every last tin-pot despot, vainly cloaked emperor or crybully mob could throw at her. Spite and sin would not cling to her. She'd wash free of them again and again and still fly trembling and tattered with all her battle-scarred and hardwon faith intact and proclaim to the world: This. This is better than anything else.

Millions of readers know Orphan X. Evan Smoak, hauled into a dark program at the age of twelve to be remade into a highly trained former government assassin, is apparently made of teflon. After quitting the program in disgust (and somehow, rather mysteriously, filthy rich), he set himself up as the "Nowhere Man" who responds to pleas from victims to set the records straight. Being extremely good at his job -- what his friend, armorer and ex-military Tommy Stojack, describes as the most dangerous man in the world -- Evan invariably succeeds.  Battling an endless series of comic book villains, he emerges relatively unscathed. 

So there is a lot of violence in these books, a dismayingly high body count, and scenes of sadism that are best skipped.  And yet I recommend them. The attraction -- what makes the Orphan X series compulsively readable -- is not the fighting and the guns. It is the social and psychological damage that the training and the many, many murders, wreaked on Evan's nature.  This is where the yoga comes in.  There are a lot of guns, the technics are overwhelming, but there is a lot of yoga-style mental and physical repair, too. There are passages which -- and I kid you not -- teach you how to breathe. Quite fascinating.

Critically isolated by his job and his nature, Evan has only two real friends.  One is a teenager with awesome computer skills, and the other is Tommy Stojack, the worldclass creator and supplier of weapons. And the premise of this book is that Tommy has let Evan down.  He has sold out to the dark side, by supplying nasties with his fancy weaponry, and Evan, feeling grossly betrayed, is set on revenge.

Tommy has retreated to a one-eyed town in some deep red state on a mission of his own.  The son of one of his fellow military has asked for his help. Tommy finds that the son is holed up with other young men who have an armory of their own and call themselves a militia. They live in poverty stricken squalor, are badly fed, are in bad health, and are pinned to far right media on their phones, with an old TV blaring one certain news channel in the background. And, fired up with racism and hateful internet chat, they had attacked a Mexican family gathering in a local park. Meaning to terrify them by driving donuts on their picnic blankets, they had ended up killing a young couple, a child, and a currently serving marine.  

Now, the boys are holed up away from likely retribution, on the advice of corrupt local law, and that's why Tommy has been asked to help. 

And though old, crippled with past wounds and arthritis, suffering from constant angina attacks, he does his utmost to understand these boys, to reform their minds, clean them up, and make them understand his message, that in America everyone is One Under the Flag.

This, for me, made the book fascinating.  The author, obviously a fervent patriot, brings a clear message to the reader. Through the character of Tommy Stojack, I got a dim understanding of these boys, that they were indoctrinated to the stage where they had no minds of their own.  It was boys like them who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2020, driven by a visceral hate that was illogical as the fact that they probably did not vote.

I strongly recommend you read Nemesis by Greg Hurwitz.  Then tell me what you think.

OUTBACK

 

I am a great fan of Garry Disher and Chris Hammer, so when a librarian recommended Patricia Wolf, I gave this, her first novel, a go. And I liked the book a lot.  

This is the first novel from a seasoned journo (published in the Guardian, among other newspapers) so there is something tentative about the plotting.  All thrillers nowadays seem to have to have a serial killer, and Aussie thrillers seem to always feature a crooked cop.  And the background to the villain came too late.  

But there were tons of redeeming features.  I really engaged with the characters, and lived with them through the story.  I desperately wanted the two good cops to survive and win.  And the descriptions of the Queensland far outback were terrific.  I look forward to a sequel, and expect to follow this author for quite a little while.

THE MIDNIGHT FEAST ... is amazing, compelling, addictive

 

I had thought that with Lucy Foley's "The Paris Apartment" I had read the best mystery ever.  But no, I was wrong.  This one is even better.

I love books that I know are inspired by other writers or films, and this is one of them. It is very, very "MidsomerMurders".  Thatched cottages, spooky woods, ghostly figures, pagan rites.  I visualized John Nettles striding through every page.

But this is better.  Foley uses these memes, twists them around, and uses them again. It sets your head spinning, in a most readable way.

The story is told from a multitude of aspects, one character after another.  Usually this is tiresome, but Foley is such a talented writer that instead the reader gets to know the characters intimately, along with all their hangups.

The suspense builds up, along with the questions.  The questions are answered in surprising ways, but still the suspense remains.

Even at the climax, though the mysteries are solved, there is a feeling that these are real people, who will carry the consequences of their actions for the rest of their lives.

Read it.  And, like me, look for the next Lucy Foley tour de force. 

ERIC and the dance

The whole world is suddenly singing this song this song ... because of Benedict Cumberbatch and a puppet.  ERIC.

What is it with Cumberbatch, anyway?  An absolutely brilliant actor who seems to specialize in portraying absolutely horrible men.

There was that evil genius behind the Brexit movement, "Brexit, the Uncivil War".  The cruel cowboy in The Power of the Dog.  And now a puppeteer with serious mental health issues who is out of his mind with vodka and whatever he has been popping or sniffing, and who has an endlessly vile tongue, lashing out at a world he considers unfair.

He also talks to a puppet.  The puppet is Eric, the star of the TV show everyone is talking about.  ERIC

He even dances with the puppet to the tune of Laura Branigan's "Gloria" in a mad and totally wonderful scene, the keynote of the six-part Netflix series.  This guy has lost his son in the dangerous underworld of vintage New York, yet he gets drunk, sniffs coke and dances with a puppet.  You have to watch to see how weird it is.  ERIC

So what did I think of the show?  Puzzling, absorbing, and all over the place.  It covers far too many issues.  Let's see if I can tick all the boxes.

Homelessness

Rapacity of property developers a la the Trump dynasty

Cop corruption (One black character says, "You know how you spell 'racism' in New York?  NYPD.")

Deviant sex

The problems of being black in NYC 

The problems of being gay in NYC

Corruption in the sanitation department (Why are baddies always Eastern European, these days?)

The problems of keeping kids safe in NYC ...

No, I can't tick them all.  Too many.  This abundance of serious social issues makes the series confusing, with just too many all at once. The final episode does tie up a lot, but questions remain. The Dad, played by Cumberbatch, cleans himself up, but still the major query is when he is going to fall off the wagon.

He's doomed.

But watch it. It's compelling, even when at its most awful.  ERIC

 

Thought-provoking short from Linda Collison

 

I have always loved Linda Collison's vivid prose, and believe I have read just about every word she has published. This short short did not let me down. At first look this is a simple story of one day in the life of a down-and-out on a moored boat in Honolulu, but beneath that surface it holds a great depth of experience and emotion. Read it for the first class writing (the description of the water by the pier will blow you away) and you will find a richly nuanced commentary on the world today that will keep you thinking for a very long time.