Reading for pleasure

Lexie Elliott (Corvus: £8.99; e-book £4.28)

This crime novel, set on an unnamed tropical island, was published in the USA by Berkley. The American spelling – color, meter, center, vise et al – has been retained for the UK edition. Who knows why. That decision certainly irritated this reviewer and proved a distraction, resulting in an unhelpful focus on the author’s repeated use of certain words throughout the text. 

Three women – Georgie, Lissa and Bronwyn – were all members of their college swimming team. Lissa, joint owner with her second husband Jem of a luxury hotel on this island, has gone missing three months previously, presumed drowned, though her body has not been recovered. The two remaining women, along with two male friends Duncan and Adam, attend Lissa’s memorial service on the island, and things start to go downhill from then on in. Is Lissa really dead? Is the hotel in financial difficulties? Is there really a malevolent sea serpent lurking in Kanu Cove? Was there something less than straightforward about the death of Graeme, Lissa’s first husband, from anaphylactic shock after eating a biscuit (cookie) with hazelnuts in it? Who knew that Graeme and Bronwyn had been having an affair? What is at the root of the intense friendship there was between Lissa and Georgie? And has Georgie’s dead sister Maddy anything to do with anything that is happening in the novel?

The action is narrated in alternating chapters by Georgie and Bronwyn with intermittent short paragraphs on potential methods of how to kill a friend. There are a few moments of tension, and some sharp observations by the narrators. However, this reviewer was left holding too many loose ends (from two many narrative strands), and without answers to several important and perfectly legitimate questions.

Despite the perceived shortcomings brought out in this review, the title is selling well. It was recently listed at number 6 on the Heatseekers Chart in The Bookseller and on one particular week had sold 1,763 copies. For comparison, the latest John Grisham had sold 15,514 and Paula Hawkins’ sales were 14,822. Lexie Elliott clearly has a readership. Her two previous titles, The French Girl (2018) and The Missing Years (2019), are ones with which I am not familiar. Her next book, Bright and Deadly Things, will be published in February 2023.

It may be that I just failed to "get into the zone” with this novel. I would be happy to receive feedback from other readers who have taken a different view.

Maria Adolfsson (Zaffre: £8.99; e-book £4.99)

This atmospheric police procedural was originally published in Sweden in 2019. It is book 2 of the Doggerland series featuring Detective Inspector Karen Eiken Hornby, and it’s a cracker. I found the idea of a populated and contemporary Doggerland with its three islands both interesting and appealing. The isolated island community provides plenty of rich material, and Eiken is a great creation with a tragic back story and all-too-human failings, like the rest of us. There are some very good descriptions of both weather and scenery, which never detracted from the narrative flow and added much to the construction of Doggerland as a real, living community with road and ferry infrastructure.

I am not normally a big fan of present tense narrative, but this one rattled along and the police procedural content was never tedious. The other police characters were well drawn and showed no signs of caricature.

In addition to the main thrust of the narrative – the investigation of the death of an elderly man discovered in a flooded quarry on Nooro – there is a storyline involving domestic violence and control, which is well handled and utterly believable. It includes incidents of real nail-biting tension.

It is always advisable to read the first book in a series first, and as soon as I had finished Wild Shores I bought a copy of Fatal Isles, which was an equally satisfying read and which filled in a few gaps (though these gaps certainly did not detract from my enjoyment of Wild Shores).

The third in the series, Cruel Tides, is scheduled for publication in January 2023. Here’s hoping that Maria Adolfsson has been able to maintain the high standards she has achieved in the first two.

Anthony Horowitz (Jonathan Cape: £20; e-book £6.99)

This is the third and final James Bond novel penned by Anthony Horowitz. That, at least, is what he tells us. Is anyone muttering, “Never say never”?

Probably the vast majority of Bond fans are more familiar with the films than with the books. As the former have become a little more mellow/PC/woke (insert your adjective of choice), so the film portrayal has moved away from Ian Fleming’s original. His Bond was a psychologically damaged, sociopathic loner. Horowitz knows the books inside out, and makes no apology for depicting Bond more in the Ian Fleming mould than the Barbara Broccoli one.

With a Mind to Kill is set just after The Man with the Golden Gun (the final Bond novel written by Fleming). In that book Bond was captured by the KGB and brainwashed, with orders to kill M. That attempt failed, but how long felt are the effects of such psychological manipulation?

This book begins with M’s funeral. The traitor responsible has been identified. His name? Bond, James Bond. Now the criminal lawyers among you may well be starting to work on your diminished responsibility and automatism defences. That, however, is just chapter 1. As you would expect, there are a couple of dozen more with twists, turns and every type of Fleming-esque nonsense.

If you are a true aficionado of the original books you will be impressed by the attention to detail. The rest of you who enjoy a light, fast paced read are in for an entertaining few hours.