Reading for pleasure: February 2023

M W Craven (Constable: £7.99; e-book £4.49)

This is the fifth full-length outing for M W Craven’s mismatched investigators, DS Washington Poe (brilliant and misanthropic) and analyst Tilly Bradshaw (brilliant and socially awkward).

“I hate locked room mysteries”, Poe meta-grumbles at one point. Unfortunately, he has several on his hands. To start with, he and Tilly have to deal with a series of baffling murders by an elusive serial killer who is going after some of the country’s most high-profile and divisive personalities, and upping the stakes by warning the targets in advance. Nonetheless the killer appears to be able to reach the victims, murder them with rare toxins, and leave without a trace, even when they’re being heavily guarded. Meantime Poe’s go-to pathologist Estelle Doyle stands accused of the murder of her wealthy father: Poe is certain she didn’t do it, even though the victim’s house was surrounded by snow, only Estelle’s footprints can be found, there’s gunshot residue on her hands which needs to be explained away somehow, and the unresolved sexual tension between the two of them hardly makes the situation any less complicated. 

Craven’s writing is increasingly assured: the plotting is richly inventive, and the dialogue crackles with dark wit. The Botanist consolidates his place in the top league of British crime writers.

Rory Clements (Zaffre: £16.99; e-book £8.09)

Clements is on sparkling form in his latest outing with his Cambridge history professor, Tom Wilde. Professor Wilde worked within the Office of Strategic Services, US military intelligence during the war.

War is over and Britain faces an uphill effort to get the economy moving. The so called “sunlit uplands”. A young couple, happily in love but with each with the wrong partner, find their romantic interlude on a Norfolk coastal beach disturbed by a huge submarine emerging from the dark depths of the North Sea. Locals unload the sub. Soon after, a nearby village finds itself closed off as residents face a virus. So opens a riveting, fast paced thriller which sees Wilde re-evaluate his friendships with two of the people he has worked with most closely over the previous years.

Oswald Mosley makes an appearance, as does Bill Donovan of the OSS, now one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, the OSS having been disbanded. There is a black book of those to be terminated should the Nazis successfully invade the UK. There’s a supplementary list. Some on the list meet a swift, unpleasant end. Why? Who is behind this? For what purpose?

Clements again reimagines a narrative drawing on military intelligence and secret tests, and work undertaken by the Axis powers. He writes with authenticity recreating a post-war Cambridge and London, and Professor Wilde scooting around Norfolk on his trusted Rudge motorbike. The reader is delightfully drawn into this enthusiastically drawn world. A book to savour.