It's often hard to know what books to pack away in our suitcases when we're heading abroad for our summer holidays. The Last Word asked Aine Toner, the editor of Woman's Way, and crime novelist Declan Burke for their recommendations.
AINE'S LIST
HUGELY SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR
I Found You by Lisa Jewell
Since her debut, Ralph's Party, in 1998, Lisa Jewell has been notching up bestsellers left, right and centre, and her latest superb offering, I Found You, is sure to join the ranks. Forty-something single mother of three Alice befriends a man she finds sitting on the beach, who claims to have lost his memory and has nothing of significance about his person. Meanwhile 21-year-old Lily, recently emigrated to London from Ukraine, suspects that her husband Carl has gone missing when he doesn't return home from work one evening. Whilst Lily's whole marriage is thrown into question when the police inform her that Carl Monrose never existed, the stranger Alice takes into her home is beginning to unlock memories that hearken back to an incident that occurred in 1993, involving a family holiday that ended in tragedy. But are the memories better left undisturbed? The synopsis reads like a particularly fanciful Jerry Springer episode and, in less accomplished hands, the story could quite easily descend into farce, but Jewell manages to make the impossible seem possible, expertly pulling off an imaginative feat par excellence. Capably handling the three intersecting storylines and her triumvirate of central characters, Jewell delivers a stunningly crafted plot to maximum effect and crafts a story that is both incredibly tense and spectacularly redemptive. One absolutely not to be missed.
BRILLIANT, ONE OF MY PICKS OF 2016
The Swimming Pool by Louise Candlish
The swimming pool: what a perfect stage. In the heady swelter of a sticky London summer, the Elm Hill lido opens. For primary school teacher Natalie, summer should mean structure – weeks of carefully organised plans with her husband Ed and their daughter Molly. But not this year. Instead, despite Molly’s extreme phobia of the water, Natalie finds herself drawn to the lido and its dazzling social scene, led by the glamorous Lara Channing. Charming and beautiful, Lara quickly welcomes Natalie into her circle of friends and soon hot summer days are spent toasting beside the pool; evenings ending with intimate cocktails on the terrace. Lara’s world is intoxicating and delicious – Natalie’s real life feels like a distant memory. Even when repressed memories of another carefree summer years ago begin to surface… But is Lara everything she seems? Or has Natalie unwittingly been swept far out of her depth?
IRISH AUTHOR
The Week I Ruined My Life by Caroline Grace Cassidy
Ali Devlin never had any doubts about marrying Colin, but two beautiful children and twelve years later she is overwhelmingly doubtful. Where is the man she fell in love with? Why does she not feel the same way about him anymore? What has happened to them? When did it all go wrong, and how is she ever going to fix it? Reigniting her passion for the arts, she finds a job in the City Arts Centre after years as a stay at home mammy. Befriending artist-in-residence, Owen O’Neill, Ali can’t help but compare him to Colin. He is everything Colin isn’t anymore: respectful, charming, caring, and undeniably sexy. There is definitely chemistry, but Ali isn’t the type of woman to have an affair, or is she? Unsure of everything in her life, a work trip to Amsterdam brings it all to a head. As events dramatically and unexpectedly unfold in front of her, Ali realises what has really been important all along. Now it’s time to stand on her own two feet, whatever the consequences.
A LIGHT ROMANTIC READ
How To Find Love In A Bookshop by Veronica Henry
Set in Peasebrook, a chocolate-box Cotswolds town, this is a light, romantic story of one girl's attempt to keep her father's charming, but financially precarious, bookshop open when she is called home after his death. If only we all had a bookshop in our lives that could deliver us what Peasebrook's does: meaning, community, true love and, of course, a happy ending. For existing fans of Henry's fare, this is a predictable but endearing romp through a legion of small-town characters and their complex, intertwined lives. It's also a love story to bookshops and reading, with the various 'top 10 lists' interspersed between chapters ('Musical Novels', 'Literary Country Houses', 'Cult Classics') tempting us to cross them off our bucket list. Perfect deckchair reading.
BRILLIANT FOLLOWUP
Lying In Wait by Liz Nugent
I read Liz’s first book, Unravelling Oliver, in one go so I had high hopes for her second read. I wasn’t disappointed. This was edge of my seat, leave your cup of tea to go cold, Wispa uneaten, few hours of reading pleasure. Andrew and Lydia Fitzsimons find themselves in an unfortunate situation but must do all they can to protect son Laurence (and, of course, their social standing). They believe Laurence to be more focused on food than on the dodgy shenanigans but it’s clear he’s not as naïve as we pretends. In fact, he’s got an obsession. An obsession that may be his own undoing. Twisty, full of plot surprises and beautifully written, it was chilling and worrying in equal measure.
VERY CLEVER PLOT
I See You by Clare Mackintosh
I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this book. Zoe Walker sees her picture in a classifieds section of a London newspaper – but doesn’t know why it’s there. Her family aren’t convinced it’s her and the next day, another woman’s picture is published, then another. Surely it’s a mistake or some weird coincidence, there must be a sensible, logical reason. What if there is a reason, but that’s because it’s someone keeping track of every move that these women make… Sounds creepy, doesn’t it, and it is but in a really well written way. I didn’t predict the ending but I’m glad it ended in the way it did.
Not sure if you’re looking for a young adult/children’s book too but there’s a new Irish book out for ages nine upwards that would be nice to mention
Gold by Geraldine Mills
Gold tells the story of twin boys Esper and Starn who live in a grim world that has been almost laid waste by massive volcanic explosions. Very little grows in Orchard, which used to be a fruit-growing area, but with the death of insects and birds, pollination of the fruit trees is a tedious and precarious undertaking. When the boys discover an intriguing old manuscript in a locked room in their apartment, which tells of gold on one of the forbidden islands the people can see from the coastline, they determine to go on gold-hunt. They manage to construct a glider that takes them far from their home territory, and so begins a whole new adventure for the boys, as they travel from island to island in search of gold. Their adventures are many and they come close to death. They do in the end, find the gold – but it is nothing like what they expected.
DECLAN'S LIST
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Corsair, €28.50)
Last year’s winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer opens with the unnamed narrator informing us that, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook.” The Sympathizer is not a typical spy novel, however; as Saigon falls, and our narrator – an intelligence officer with the South Vietnamese army – escapes to America, we learn that he is a double agent working for the Viet Cong, with a perspective that allows this nameless man to give voice to the voiceless millions of Vietnamese who have been silenced and moulded by American cultural imperialism ever since the end of the Vietnam War (the section of the novel in which the narrator works as a consultant on a movie loosely modelled on Apocalypse Now is as funny as it is fatalistic). The setting and scenario brings to mind Graham Greene, although the latter stages evolve into a nightmarish scenario that is both Orwellian and Kafkaesque. Written in a spare, precise style, it’s an absorbing and ambitious novel that pits the wits of our unnamed Machiavelli against “the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”
Maestra by L.S. Hilton (Zaffre, €19.50)
L.S. Hilton’s debut Maestra opens with Judith, an assistant at a London auction house, taking a part-time job as a hostess in a sleazy champagne bar. Intoxicated by the easy money, and resenting the way her snobbish auction house colleagues ignore her genuine love of art, Judith schemes to escape her dead-end life, using her knowledge of art, her sexuality and a white-hot rage to get whatever it is her heart desires. The basic plot, which finds Judith cutting a swathe through the South of France, Rome and Paris, is modelled on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley: the working-class Judith appreciates the finer things in life more than those who possess them, and thus she is entitled to appropriate her baubles by any means necessary. Where Highsmith created a tragedy, however, Maestra borders on knowing farce, particularly in the way Judith transforms virtually overnight from meek art house assistant into a slick sociopathic killer (Judith is more James Bond than Tom Ripley). Nevertheless, it’s a glamorous, witty and adrenaline-fuelled romp: if you like your heroines sexy, vengeful, amoral and lethal, Maestra delivers in spades.
Art in the Blood by Bonnie MacBird (Collins Crime Club, €28.50)
Bonnie MacBird’s Art in the Blood, a Sherlock Holmes adventure, takes its title from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter: “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.” At a low ebb when the story opens, Holmes is revitalised when the French chanteuse Cherie La Victoire asks him to find her missing son, and soon Holmes and Watson are embroiled in a plot that involves stolen Greek statuary, the powerful Earl of Pellingham, and the abuse of children in Northern England’s satanic mills. MacBird delivers a pacy read in this faithful, full-blooded and breathlessly (albeit unevenly) plotted homage, although it’s her interpretation of Holmes that is the most intriguing aspect of the story, with Watson declaring from the beginning that it was Holmes’ artistic streak that made him the greatest detective the world has ever known. Here Holmes is an instinctive artist teetering on the edge of physical, emotional and psychological exhaustion, “tempestuous, changeable … and vulnerable to flights of fancy as well as fits of despair,’ as Holmes himself describes Cherie. That unusual vulnerability runs contrary to the canonical depiction of Holmes as an unfeeling, rational, virtually superhuman machine, and makes MacBird’s debut a welcome addition to the Sherlock Holmes literature.
A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas (Harvill Secker, €19.50)
Already a four-time winner of the CWA’s International Dagger, A Climate of Fear is Fred Vargas’s ninth novel in the Paris-based Commissaire Adamsberg series. The apparent suicide of an old woman leads the Zen-like Adamsberg and his team to investigate a bizarre double murder on a remote Icelandic island ten years previously, although the team soon realises that their murderer is intimately involved with a cult devoted to enacting the speeches of Robespierre, Danton et al during the post-Revolutionary years of ‘the Terror’. Quirky doesn’t even begin to cover the plotting and characters here, but Vargas – the crime-writing pseudonym of French writer, historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau – is a veteran of 14 novels of total and remains in complete command of her bizarre investigation. The tone may be offbeat, and the affectionate bickering between the members of Adamsberg’s extended team amusing, but Vargas is assured in the way she marshals her narrative elements around a fascinating exploration of how a corrupted group dynamic can parlay historical horrors into contemporary crimes.
The Killing of Polly Carter by Robert Thorogood (Harlequin, €19.50)
Robert Thorogood is best known for creating the BBC TV series Death in Paradise, which is set on a fictional Caribbean island and originally featured DI Richard Poole (since replaced by DI Humphrey Goodman), an uptight British policeman struggling to adapt to the idiosyncratic rhythms of Saint Marie. Thorogood revived Poole for his debut novel, A Meditation on Murder (2014), and Poole returns again in The Killing of Polly Carter. World famous supermodel Polly Carter announces her intention to commit suicide before leaping from the cliff near her home on Saint Marie, her death witnessed by Polly’s twin sister, Claire. Poole’s suspicions are aroused, however, and soon he is leading his team in a murder investigation. Despite the contemporary setting, the Death in Paradise mysteries are deliciously retro Agatha Christie-style whodunits, with Poole trawling a shoal of red herrings as he interrogates his list of suspects. Much of the pleasure, meanwhile, is derived from Poole’s fish-out-of-water helplessness as he flops around trying to cope with Saint Marie’s heat, cultural quirks and easy-going pace of life, all the while wondering if ‘his entire existence as an Englishman was no more than Pavlovian conditioning.’
Paradime by Alan Glynn (Faber, €20.55)
Alan Glynn’s fifth novel opens with Danny Lynch, ex-military and a veteran of two Iraq tours and recently returned from Afghanistan, struggling to cope with anxiety and dread as he tramps the streets of New York. Unemployed, suffering the symptoms of PTSD, Danny’s relationship with his girlfriend Kate is on the rocks. Unable to remember any specific detail about his time in Iraq, Danny is haunted by vivid memories of a horrific incident witnessed in Afghanistan. ‘It’s just that I really, really don’t want to remember them – wholesale, retail, it doesn’t matter.’
That glancing reference to Philip K. Dick evokes the recurring theme of paranoid conspiracy that has run like a seam through Alan Glynn’s work since the publication of his debut, The Dark Fields, in 2002. His subsequent novels, the ‘globalisation trilogy’ of Winterland (2009), Bloodland (2011) and Graveland (2013), were set in that shadowy vector where capitalism corrupts democracy, and Paradime continues in a similar vein. When it appears that Danny is planning to blow the whistle on Gideon Logistics, the contractor operating at the Afghani military base where two service personnel were murdered during a riot, Danny is threatened with public disgrace, financial ruin and a prison sentence. It’s a scenario familiar to any fan of the classic ’70s tales of paranoid conspiracy – Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View – but it’s at this point that Glynn introduces his joker in the pack, when Danny meets Teddy Trager, a billionaire tech visionary and Danny’s doppelgänger. Danny becomes obsessed with Trager, mimicking his dress and speech – a man with nothing to lose fixated on the man who has it all. Traditionally, in literary terms, a paranormal harbinger of doom, the appearance of his doppelgänger initially appears to be a stroke of outrageous good fortune for Danny, although soon he is contemplating the existential nightmare of seeing himself reflected in, and refracted through, his awareness of his own essential truth.
An enthralling psychological thriller-cum-tragedy, Paradime raises more questions than it answers. Is Danny, our Everyman, a ‘puppet with a soul’ plodding along in a noir-ishly predetermined universe? Or is he that most fascinating of literary creations, the character bound by Fate but determined to rebel, regardless of personal cost, against the chains that bind? All told, it’s a pulsating tale from one of the most inventive practitioners working in contemporary crime fiction, a novel that pounds to the rhythms of the conventional thriller but employs the thriller’s tropes to divert its protagonist, and the reader, down some very unusual dark alleyways.
