Isabel Carey has recently married Philip who is a GP and together they’ve moved to a Yorkshire town where he starts his medical practice. While Philip is happy with his new career and surroundings, Isabel can’t seem to settle. She feels like everybody she meets in the town is judging her and can’t stand the apartment they’re renting, which is impossible to keep warm, or her landlady who lives on the floor above them and seems to spend all her time pacing from the door to the window and back again. This noise keeps Isabel awake at night and makes her uncomfortable.

One night, while Philip is out working, Isabel can’t shake the cold and searches the house for something to keep her warm. When she finds an old greatcoat at the back of a cupboard she takes it down and finds that it keeps her deliciously warm and allows her to sleep. That sleep though is filled with very vivid dreams. When a knock on her front window wakes her up she is scared when she sees a young handsome Air Force pilot staring at her through the window. She quickly closes her curtains but when she opens them again for a second look the man has gone.

It isn’t long before the pilot is knocking on her window again and mouthing her name. This time curiosity wins out over fear and Isabel lets him into her house. To her amazement Isabel discovers that although she has never met this man named Alec before, he seems to know her. And somehow Isabel develops memories about him and his relationship to her as they spend time together. Memories that are vivid and very realistic, although she knows that they can’t be hers.

Soon Isabel finds herself in a passionate affair with Alec while uncertain as to what is real and what isn’t. Because her affair with Alec seems to be taking place during the war rather than in the present while there are manifestations of his visits in her life with Philip.
And all the time her landlady continues her walking from the front door to the window and back again.

This is a fascinating ghost story. The reader has no more of an idea as to what is really happening and what is supernatural than Isabel does. As Isabel slowly pieces together who Alec is and why he is visiting her, so does the reader, and when it seems that all the questions are answered and the haunting has been brought to a peaceful end there is still one more disaster to avert.

In many ways this was as much a love story as a ghost story. Although the way in which the ghost takes over Isabel’s life and memories is spooky, it is never heartstoppingly scary because at no point is there the impression that the ghost has anything but love for the woman he’s visiting. On the other hand, the reader is only too aware that consorting with one who should have departed can’t lead to anything good and can only hope that Isabel will figure that out too, before it is too late.

Helen Dunmore has written a beautiful and haunting story which draws the reader in to England in the late 1950’s. Her descriptions make the greyness of the surroundings and the harshness of life at the time come to life and her characters are realistic.

The thing I appreciated most in this book though is that the author didn’t try to give logical explanations for everything that happens in the story. Some things remain unexplained or uncertain, leaving the reader with much to wonder and fantasise about after the last page has been read.

This book is published by Hammer, better known for its horror movies, through Random house and there will be more original ghost stories to follow. If this book sets the standard, then this is one publishing innovation to look forward to and embrace.

Buried Secrets marks the return of “private spy,” Nick Heller, the ex-Special Forces tough guy introduced in Vanished.  When the daughter of a hedge fund magnate is kidnapped, Heller, a friend of the girl’s family, begins a desperate search for her.  This is no run-of-the-mill kidnap caper though; the girl, Alexa, is being held in a coffin ten feet beneath the ground, with only a limited supply of food and water.

As primal fears go, premature burial is among the most profound.  Finder knows this, and exploits it to great effect.  Flitting between the first person for Heller and third for the coffin scenes, he reminds us how less is more.  Never lingering on Alexa for more than a few pages, he ensures her claustrophobic horror permeates the narrative.  With every minute that passes for Heller on the surface, we’re forced to contemplate the hell endured by Alexa.  Despite the initial terror though, Finder still leaves enough in the tank to allow him to ramp up the jeopardy still further for the finale.  The faint hearted should steer well clear.

As heroes go, it is a joy to watch Heller work.  A formidable and well-drilled fighter, morally committed, and with an impressive ability to detect deception, he has many of the hallmarks of the finest thriller protagonists.  He may lack the idiosyncrasies that mark the very best of his number, but there is time yet for those to materialise.

The research for Buried Secrets was clearly committed, but also extensive.  Enlightening details are included on surveillance, close-quarter combat, financial wizardry and the realities of prison gangs, but as with the best research, these are never dumped unthinkingly onto the page.  The pacing throughout is spot on, unencumbered by Finder’s proving of his credentials.

Overall, Buried Secrets is a dark and pulsating thriller from a deservedly successful writer.  For a long time, Finder steered clear of creating a returning character, not wishing to stretch the limits of plausibility by subjecting a protagonist to endless trauma.  In re-thinking this approach, he has created something that, on the strength of this outing, promises to keep thriller fans entertained for years to come.

It is the yogi in me that was attracted to this book, and the yogi in me enjoyed it. But is it necessary to practice yoga in order to appreciate the book? Probably not, though I think it definitely helps (although the classes described in it are not much like any of the classes I have attended). Although centred around yoga, really this book is about relationships and evolving life journeys, whether difficult, rewarding, scary, exciting, or venturing into the unknown. 

Tales from the Yoga Studio is primarily about women, and is undoubtedly aimed at female readers. The male characters are secondary to the leads, who are all various presentations of Californian clichés; an actress (Imani), a screen-writer (Stephanie), a working mother with an unstable marriage (Lee), a recovering addict (Katherine), and a dancer vying for a role in Beyoncé’s upcoming video (Graciela). As well as the characters themselves, stereotypes of Los Angeles are depicted, with much referencing to the film and music industries, the importance of appearances (both with regard to fashion and location), and following the latest trends. This bordered on a little tiresome at times, but thankfully was well balanced with the setting of more laid back, old-fashioned, bohemian, Silver Lake as Edendale Yoga’s home.

It was not difficult to become immersed in the book right from the beginning. Written in the rather contemporary style of swapping chapters for regular line breaks between paragraphs, its momentum never falters. The reader is constantly switching between the lives of the five main characters, without much time to dwell on any one person or situation. Personally I enjoyed reading about Katherine the most, as she seemed more realistic, imperfect, and likeable than the others, and she is also the one I could most imagine being friends with. This, I think, would greatly please Rain Mitchell, as a real sense of community is created in Tales from the Yoga Studio. If a reader is able to relate to this community and feel part of it, then I think this book has done its job. It has been written as the first in a series, and although this is something that I would usually shy away from (books written for the sake of satisfying a production-line deal do not generally appeal to me), I have to admit that I am curious to know what will happen next.

Also, reading Tales from the Yoga Studio has certainly made me wish that I could try out one of Lee’s apparently amazing classes. (I would also really love to have my own vintage yellow sundress and pink Dutch bicycle.)

Degrees of Freedom

Not all of Petrovitch’s allies are still to be trusted, indeed one of them is trying to frame him, the CIA is still out to kill him and his most useful asset, the Artificial Intelligence known as Michael, is cut off from the outside world in a quantum computer in the basement of bombed out remains of the Oshicora Tower; to cap it all, he and his wife are not on the best of terms. With his physical shape worse than ever (he’s gradually becoming more and more dependent on technology to suppress his pain and he spends half his life talking to computers), Petrovitch once again takes it upon himself to save not just London but the world (and, if he can, to get the girl). The Americans had better watch out.

Once again,we are treated to a rollicking, fast-paced and unusual cyber-thriller come SF-adventure – short, punchy and very enjoyable, and a worthy way to end this commendable trilogy.

I’ll let the diary tell its own story.

Friday 8 September 1939

Janka Neumann, a Czech refugee, came as our servant. Her husband, a Jewish mill-owner, had been murdered after the German invasion.

Saturday 1 June 1940

The Inspector has been busy killing scores of dogs, which have come over with the troops. All our Sappers left last night. They are building barricades etc. everywhere. Evacuation of Dunkirk completed.

Sunday 14 July 1940

Phyllis and Daphne went to church. At 11:30 p.m. I felt my bedroom shake and thought it was big guns, but it was an earthquake.

Monday 22 September 1941

Captain Whitfield gave us a lecture on the defence against the invasion of Kent. It gave me personally a feeling of confidence. In the middle of his lecture there was a violent explosion.

Tuesday 9 December 1941

From what one can gather the American fleet were wiped out at their anchorage. America is now a united nation. Daphne went to her guide meeting.

Sunday 10 May 1942

I saw two women dive into a shop and further on two policemen bolt into the police station. At the same time I heard two thumps and, realizing something was up, I dashed from the car and dived into a narrow doorway. Low overhead, a black Hun flew spraying the roads with bullets.

Tuesday 6 June 1944

Overcast sky, cold with occasional sun. Daphne spent the whole day with her Guides on the golf links and Scene Farm. At 2 p.m. a convoy of about 12 large ships came down the strait escorted by destroyers and small craft. They were fired on by the French coast guns; one was hit and had to return to Dover. Everything very quiet, few troops and few planes up.

Wednesday 15 August 1945

The WAR is ended. Attlee announced the Japanese surrender at midnight. What I mistook for battle practice was the firing of crackers. A bonfire was lit in the centre of Red Lion Square, and the snowplough was burnt.

No doubt Rodney Foster’s diary is in the remainder bookshops by now. Criminal. There’s material for a great film in here.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s cut to the chase.  Former US Marine and LAPD Detective Joseph Wambaugh is crime writing royalty; gushing blurbs from Pelecanos, Connelly and Reichs confirm as much, and then there’s the small matter of his MWA Grand Master Award.  Hollywood Hills is the fourth in his Hollywood Station series, an anecdote-laden series following the exploits of the men and women of the LAPD as they patrol the streets of Hollywood.

“This is f***ing Hollywood,” is the mantra of the beat cops, a catch-all phrase to explain the violent, the depraved, and the downright bizarre.  Sense of place is vital in crime writing, but often the action could be transplanted to another location without jarring.  Not so for Wambaugh’s Hollywood.  This is not a tale of the generic modern metropolis, but of a very distinct corner of California.  Where else could cops find themselves on the receiving end of a brutality complaint from Superman, or arrest Elmo the Muppet for aggressive panhandling?  This is a world where cosmetic surgeons outnumber realtors, and cops flirt with wealthy widows with a view to landing film roles.  Hollywood is a unique pocket of civilisation, with a gravitational pull that attracts hordes of chancers, junkies and naïve starlet wannabes.

Wambaugh covers every stratum of this strange society, from Leona Brueger’s opulent mansion, to the squalid apartment of youthful junkies Jonas and Megan.  Many of the tales in Hollywood Hills, as with the rest of the series, are borrowed from the true life experiences of real cops (credited inside the rear cover), and as such, they cover a broad cross-section of crime.  At the street level, the LAPD wrestle not with criminal masterminds but with the drug-addicted, the desperate and the deranged (often with the latter two being corollaries of the former), men like Jonas Claymore, unable to stay clean and sober long enough to enact even the most basic plan.  Contrast this with the tale of Raleigh the high-class butler, coerced into participating into a high-stakes art theft; a world away from Jonas’ existence but rubbing shoulders with it nonetheless.

This is not a crime book in the classic sense; it does not focus on a single investigation, rather it offers a series of vignettes, by turns violent, harrowing, hilarious and touching.  At its most horrifying extreme, Hollywood Hills features a graphic description of infanticide that will test even the most stoic of readers.  At the opposite end of the emotional scale, it features tales so amusing they could only be true.

The LAPD enjoys comfortably the worst reputation of any police force in the world.  Films, books, TV series and music have all been created bemoaning its corruption and brutality, but with Hollywood Hills, Joseph Wambaugh stands firm in defence of his former colleagues.  As ever, the brass are treated with scorn, but the rank and file cops are essentially decent, courageous, hard-working, and hampered by onerous and ill-deserved red tape.  Indeed, there is more than a touch of Ed McBain to Hollywood Hills; it centres on a macho squad-room, imbued with a rich camaraderie born of years spent together in the trenches of law enforcement.

Overall, Hollywood Hills is expansive, superbly-observed, thoroughly amusing and sickeningly dark.  In short, this is exactly what one would expect from one of the very best in the business.

When Angelmaker starts, it quickly seems as though it is shaping up to be an addition to the growing sub-genre of ‘alternative / hidden London’ fantasies that have been so well executed by Mieville, Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Griffin, among others. Joshua Joseph Spork is the only son of Matthew Spork, legendary gangster and creator of the Night Market – as such, Joshua Joseph (Joe to his friends) has all the knowledge of the subterranean ways of London and its shadier denizens; but he tries to emulate his grandfather, the late Daniel Spork, a fixer of clockwork and other arcane mechanisms, and lead a blameless life. Of course, we know what happens to characters in novels who start out trying to lead blameless lives, and after visitations from some dodgy government types and a mysterious monk, it becomes apparent that Joe’s buddy Billy Friend has inadvertently dragged him in to something he’d rather not be involved in – and that the scope of the story is much bigger than London. The fate of the world is at stake!

The other main character, Edie Bannister, is the means by which the back story of the Angelmaker is revealed – now an old lady in possession of a one-toothed, vile-smelling pug named Bastion, she was in her time a secret agent for the British Government, travelling all over the world to defend the honour of the British Crown. Her story, too, has its share of twisted technology and flights of fancy – in the shape of devices and conveyances hand-crafted by an order of craftsman-monks inspired by the philosophies of John Ruskin. It is through Edie’s story that we come to understand the origins of the Doomsday device that Joe has inadvertently been drawn in to helping to resurrect, and the mergence of her tale with Joe’s is the point where things really kick off. Joe has to decide who he really is – the grandson of a humble artisan, or the son of one of the most feared and respected gangsters ever to walk the London streets – if he is going to confront the forces arrayed against him and make the world safe.

It’s a ripping yarn, and Harkaway has a wonderfully deft touch – whether it’s with the secret technologies of Edie Bannister’s career (all very steampunk and evocative of Captain Nemo and such), or the genuinely entrancing relationship that develops between Joe and Polly, an assistant to his improbably smooth and redoubtable lawyer Mercer Cradle. It’s dark too – people die, characters incidental and otherwise, and there is a genuinely harrowing sequence when Joe falls in to the hands of his enemies and is tortured (Harkaway’s knowledge of modern torture techniques is surely fed by his wife’s work for a human rights charity, Reprieve, that deals with Guantánamo Bay inmates, among others). The overwhelming impression, though, is of a tale beautifully and expansively told – readers who enjoyed The Gone-Away World should have no hesitation in picking up Angelmaker, but I hope it will reach out to a wider audience. It deserves one.

Gunderson is a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, in the heart of the Midwest, where Jello layer-cake is the local culinary delight, and people say “I-Rack” instead of Iraq. He has just made tenure. His research is going places. He is a superstar teacher. But he’s just come to the realization that his life is pretty darn empty and he has just three days of leave in which to find his soul-mate. There starts a hilarious frenzy of speed dating, hair-colouring, and asking all and sundry the unanswerable question, “What do women want?” The quest brings him in contact with more women than he has seen the backsides of in years, but this makes him feel constantly on the verge of vomiting.

And he fell. He had no parachute. He sailed through a layer of clouds, then a layer of blue sky, then a layer of clouds as if he was jumping through a parfait, and at each cloud level, a holographic sense of a naked woman waved at him in a way that said, ‘See you soon.’ Were these women about sex or about death?

Gunderson asks himself this question as his mind gets more fogged by sex than a horny teenager’s and his whole being is taken up by his hopeless search. Can Newton and Einstein help him along his way? Can his co-researchers offer him words of wisdom about sex and orthodontics? And will it all happen for him, or is he doomed to spend the rest of his life playing with abstractions?

Christopher Meeks’s story is the kind that new writers love to hear. He used to work in publishing, and then later, in public affairs at CalArts. His second novel, Love at Absolute Zero, found the one thing you’re told you need in order to make it big – a New York agent who believes in your writing. But no publishing house wanted to touch a novel that combined the seeming incompatibilities of quantum mechanics and love. More than two years later, Meeks decided to bring the novel out under his own indie imprint White Whisker Books, and the book went on to win the Best Indie Romance Award and many rave reviews.

It may be a bit of a cliché to say that publishers find it hard to commit to comedic fiction, but there it is. Meeks’s novel is evidence that good writing is turned down more often than brussels sprouts at Christmas dinner if the concept sounds too quirky for the mainstream market. The novel isn’t flawless. Ursula’s character seems underdeveloped – she is more a two-dimensional fantasy cooked up by a physicist, sometimes, than a real woman. The ending is a tad rushed. But, on the whole, the book is a hilarious read.

Narcopolis

The ‘drug novel’ inspires trepidation and occasionally despair in many readers. Greats of the genre, such as Naked Lunch by William Burroughs and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick, delve so deeply into the ‘reality’ of drug-induced psychosis that they can feel incomprehensible, perhaps even indulgent. Happily, while Narcopolis contains wildly inventive, at times hilarious and horrifically surreal sequences – particularly memorable is a depiction of the Bombay rainy season, with junkies and pushers as ship-wrecked mariners clinging to life, or sanity – this is not a charge that can be levelled at Thayil. As his well-drawn characters, from pimps to poets, fall deeper under the opium spell, losing their sense of self to their dependency, the author never takes his hand from the narrative tiller.

This is achieved because Thayil cares less for making a record of the sexual and hallucinatory practices of the Bombay underworld, fun though that may be, but for what led his characters there. Particularly arresting is the story of Mr Lee, which depicts the madness – no less irrational than that provided by the opium pipe – of the Chinese cultural revolution more skillfully in 50 pages than many textbooks have managed. Despite the unsentimental tone of these pages – befitting Lee’s sober manner – the description of his father as a pipe-dependent insect is tragic and haunting. Yet his mother, driven to suicide by madness, was no less a victim of indoctrination. Despite his wealth and success, Rashid, the pipe den owner, nostalgically yearns for his earlier life as a poor, scheming criminal, before opium sickness numbed his wit.

Thayil returns time again to the theme of death, or rather, death wish and of opium as sedative. Xavier, the celebrity poet and sexual bon vivant, delivers a bleak but elegant monologue on the nature of addiction, ending “most of all, the addict wants to obliterate time”. Later the tormented Dimple – who undergoes physical and emotional metamorphosis – is observed as “a woman who understands death. who has tasted the meat of it and it pleases her.”

Narcopolis represents a truly international work of fiction: influenced by and sitting comfortably alongside western works such as Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, yet possessing a quintessentially Indian sensibility that suggests more than a simple crude shift of time or place. Bombay is a city of demented dreams and lost souls where a sadistic sexual encounter is still a form of human contact, however brutal.

Or, more simply, a “crazy fucking city”.

Pressia is one of those who live outside, struggling to stay alive and fearing her sixteenth birthday. Once she’s 16 she will have to leave her grandfather, her only surviving relative, and report for duty. Either she’ll be trained to be a soldier, or if she’s deemed too weak, she’ll be turned into prey, to be hunted down and killed. Although life is bleak and dangerous Pressia hangs on to vague memories and stories about life before the destruction and believes the message that came from the Dome at the time: “We know you are here, our brothers and sisters. We will, one day emerge from the Dome to join you in peace. For now we watch from afar, benevolently.” Others are not so sure that the Dome has any benevolent intentions.

Inside the Dome Partridge has lived a life of privilege. With his father being a very powerful figure in the Dome’s organization, he has had little to worry about, except that his mother is dead and his brother has recently killed himself. And Partridge knows he’s different from the other kids in the Dome. Somehow the programmes that exist to enhance male teenagers in the Dome don’t work on Partridge, and this may be the result of something her mother did before he was moved into the Dome. When Partridge discovers that his mother may still be alive he decides to escape the Dome, find his mother and maybe also the truth.

Soon Pressia and Partridge meet each other in the dangerous world outside the Dome and both of them will have to face truths that upset everything they ever held true and stare death in the face on more than one occasion, because both of them are central to the future of the world they live in.

This is an imaginative dystopian novel. The Post-apocalyptic world described sounds extremely realistic and is portrayed in vivid pictures that are all too easy to imagine. Both Pressia and Partridge are fully formed characters. They aren’t super-human heroes rather than scared youngsters trying to figure out what is going on around them and how to best deal with it. The same is true for the characters they interact with, all are well-rounded and multifaceted which makes them real to the reader and fascinating to read about.

The same can be said for the story as a whole. There are multiple layers to the story, only a few of which are actually revealed in this first installment. Other discoveries, still to be made, are only hinted at, and I’m sure there are more that are still completely hidden from the reader.

Julianna Baggott succeeds in drawing the reader into her frightening world and make them care about those who live there, their well-being and future. Some writers have it in them to create a new reality on the pages of a book, and Baggott is one of those. She has created a world and characters I care about and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel to this book in the future, although I’m well aware that I will have a long wait ahead of me.