Harriet Devine's Blog

Harriet (by Elizabeth Jenkins)

Last October I tried to read this book, and if you were reading my blog then you might have spotted it in a post called 'What I Haven't Read This Week'. Yes, I tried it and gave it up, thinking that it was too depressing. But when Persephone kindly offered me a copy, I thought I really should give it another try -- the title, after all, seemed to demand it, and also the fact that part of it is set in Penge, in South East London, where my daughter and family live. I've just finished it, and I am so glad I did, as it is a remarkable novel.

The thing about this book is that there are, in one sense, no surprises. Jenkins based the story on a true crime that took place in the 1870s, and most people who pick up the novel will be aware before they start of the bare bones of the plot. Harriet, in her early 30s, is a woman with learning difficulties, or as Jenkins puts it

what the villagers in Mrs Ogilvy's old home would have called a natural. Her intellect was not so clouded that intercourse with ordinary people was out of the question; the deficiency showed itself rather in a horrid uncouthness, the more noticeable in that she had a vigorous and powerful zest for such aspects of life as were intelligible to her.

 She has been well brought up by a loving mother, takes care of herself and pride in her appearance, likes nice clothes and pleasant things around her. She is also an heiress, having three thousand pounds to her name and another two thousand on the way - according to my edition that's about a million in today's money. This is her downfall. She encounters a young man, Lewis Oman, who quite ruthlessly decides to marry her for her fortune, and he succeeds in doing so despite her mother's best efforts to prevent him. At first he looks after her fairly well, and even makes her pregnant. But after the child is born his treatment of her deteroriates, and eventually he moves her into his brother's house in the country and takes his young mistress to live with him nearby. Some months later, Harriet is dead, having been terribly mistreated and seemingly starved to death. This dreadful affair, and the trial that followed, came to be known as the Penge Murder, as this was the area of London where Harriet finally died.

You can see why I thought this novel was going to be depressing, and the subject matter is, indeed, very disturbing. But Jenkins handles the material so tactfully that the real fascination is not with Harriet's sufferings -- these are not glossed over, but they are implied rather than dwelt on -- but with the extraordinary psychology of the people who have her in their care. Harriet is sent to live with Lewis's painter brother Patrick and his devoted wife Elizabeth, whose younger sister Alice is Lewis's mistress. There is never point at which these four people make a decision to starve or otherwise mistreat Harriet, and in fact the matter is never discussed. Instead, it comes to pass slowly, over time, and everyone somehow manages to convince themselves that they are in the right. There's a telling moment quite early on when Elizabeth visits Alice at her home and finds her in the kitchen, ironing. Sitting down at the table, she sees that her sister is ironing some beautiful pieces of silk and realises they have been unpicked from a dress of Harriet's of a beautiful jay's wing blue, which Alice had earlier seen and admired, thinking to herself at the time how much better it would suit her than Harriet. Elizabeth says nothing -- she just looks away silently. A weak woman, she is so besotted with her husband Patrick that she will never question anything he does or says, while Patrick in turn is completely devoted to handsome, flashy, common Lewis. The unusually close relationship between the two brothers is never more evident than after their arrest when they are put together into a cell:

the brothers did not lie down. Seated side by side, their arms round each other, they whispered into each other's ears all night long. It was the conslusion of all the midnight conversations they had held as children, when, side by side in the double bed, they had whispered under the clothes so as not to be heard next door. The darkness was the same; it was the same surrounding silence. Patrick had pulled the blankets round their shoulders, and their breath was warm and damp on each other's cheeks just as it had ever been; and the confidence was the same -- the unreserve they had never achieved with women, or with anyone except each other.

The other fascinating character is Alice. Very young, very beautiful, entirely selfish, she plays a less active part in the final mistreatment of Harriet, though she is perfectly well aware of what is going on. She acquires Harriet's clothes and jewellery and is happy to use Lewis's, or rather Harriet's, money to live a life of luxury and ease which she would never have expected from her rather humble beginnings. There's a wonderful moment when she has had the most glorious dress made, entirely of crepe, the dim mauve of lilac or heliotrope flowers; the bodice and sleeves were tight to Alice's beautiful slenderness --  and she is almost overwhelmed:

when she put it on, she was amazed, vain as she was, at the mysterious beauty of her own appearance. It seemed as if all the resource and intelligence and taste and determination which had been developing all her life had reached their zenith in creating this; her charm had reached its full perfection; and she was awed by the spectacle of herself. As she stood with the light of the chandelier revealing her, gazing at Lewis, her smile had in it something rapt and solemn, as if she were the vestal guardian of her own loveliness.

As I'm sure you can see, Jenkins writes beautifully, and her perecption and understanding of the inner lives of these people is wonderfully done. True crime is a genre I usually avoid like the plague, but this is something else -- moving, thought-provoking, it will stay with me for a long time. And next time I go to Penge I will try to find Harriet's grave, which still exists in St George's Church in Beckenham.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Nordic crime is immensely popular at the moment, and there are many terrific examples out there -- Wallander, of course, and Steig Larsson, and many others. But how many people have read the originators of the genre, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö? 

I had, actually, read one of their ten-book Martin Beck series many years ago, though I can't now remember which one. But it was on a trawl through Audible, to whom I pay a subscription for a monthly audio book, that my attention was caught by The Laughing Policeman, which is in fact number 4 in a series which really ought to be read in order. And I am completely hooked, so I am now going to go back to the beginning and read the whole lot. In fact I am absolutely in agreement with Louise France, who wrote in an excellent Guardian article a couple of years ago that you want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints. 

You can click those links to delve into the background of all this, but suffice it to say here that the writers were a couple, and decided from the start to write ten books, one a year, the whole series to be titled The Story of a Crime. They wrote an alternate chapter each, and edited each other's chapters. And the series title was making a political point -- both were committed Marxists, and their intention was to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare-state of the bourgeois type'. If you think that makes the novels sound as if they may be heavy going, think again. Yes, there is social comment in there, but it doesn't detract from the interest of the plot. 

I started this post two months ago! and have now read three of the series -- The Locked Room was the second, and I have just finished Roseanna, the first of the series. Although enjoyed the other two, I must say I thought Roseanna was absolutely superb. Of course it's helpful to start at the beginning of a series, and it was great to be introduced for the first time to Martin Beck, the rather surly, dyspeptic, unhappily married detective who will be central to all the novels. Beck smokes, has digestive problems, and suffers from chronic insomnia. He dislikes his wife who he feels he has nothing in common with (I must say I find this the least attractive thing about these novels -- it seems to me that the reader is invited to dislike her too, which I find a bit offensive). He works with a number of colleagues to solve various crimes, but if you think this is going to be exciting and fast-paced, think again. In Roseanna, months go by in which nothing at all happens. For this is a police procedural, and undoubtedly extremely true to life.

Briefly, what happens is this. A young woman's body is discovered in a lake, and nobody is able to identify her. Photos appear in the newspapers, Interpol is contacted, missing persons are followed up, but the whole thing remains a mystery for a very long time. Eventually a call from America clears it up -- this is Roseanna McGraw, from Lincoln Nebraska, who set off in the summer for a holiday in Scandinavia. It becomes clear that she died on a cruise ship that has passed through the area at the time, and now begins the painstaking process of contacting all the passengers to see if anyone can shed any light on what may have happened. But nobody can, until someone at the police station has the bright idea of asking for photos taken on the cruise. This is again a painstakingly slow and frustrating process, but at last a series of cine-films turns up which show Roseanna with an unidentified man. Yes, but who on earth is he? He's not one of the listed passengers, though he is clearly participating in the acitivities of the cruise...

This novel was published in 1965, and of course it's impossible not to be aware of the massive changes in communication that have taken place since. When Martin is contacted by the American detective Kafka (yes, really), their exchanges of information take place with infinite slowness -- crackly phone calls, long waits for photographs to come through the post, and so on. The detectives have to squint at tiny photos, often through a magnifying glass. And everything has to be printed and sent out by post. But it's not really all this, or not entirely all this, that slows everything up. This is real life -- well, not really, of course, it's fiction, but I'm sure it is a very good representation of what real life must be like for the police. Martin does have quite good intuition, and he is right when he finally decides on the identity of the murderer. But the last section of the novel, when the man seems to have been identified, is absolutely brilliant -- they must set a trap for him, and a young policewoman is recruited for the purpose -- for weeks and weeks it seems that nothing will happen -- an apparently fail-safe plan is conceived which in the end is almost foiled by a heavy traffic jam -- the tension is brilliantly done. 

So -- if you are an admirer of Nordic crime, you really should try these remarkable novels, which, it's clear, have been profoundly influential on the writers who have followed. My edition of Roseanna had an introduction by Henning Mankell in which he admits as much. I shall be reading more of them, though I may or may not bore you with more of my ravings. Highly recommended.

Kind of Cruel

This is an absolutely brilliant novel. I've read all Sophie Hannah's earlier ones and enjoyed them all, some more than others, but this one I think is unquestionably her best yet, and that's saying something. Her great talent is her ability to set up the most extraordinary, impossible situations and then slowly reveal how they can in fact be solved, and this one -- best described as a psychological thriller -- is no exception.

The central character here is one Amber Hewerdine, a young woman in her thirties. As the novel begins, she is consulting a hypnotherapist -- very much a last resort -- in an attempt to cure her chronic insomnia. Highly intelligent and extremely sceptical, Amber is very dubious about trying hypnosis, and the chapter in which the reader is privy to her thoughts as the therapist starts to try to put her under is wonderfully done. Amber thinks she has not succumbed, but then she suddenly finds herself saying some apparently irrational words -- "Kind -- Cruel -- Kind of Cruel". She has no idea where they came from or what they mean,and  though she seems to have a memory of seeing them written down somewhere she cannot recollect when, where, or in what context. 

And so the story progresses, with more and more apparently unrelated mysteries spiraling off in all directions, and Amber somehow being connected with all of them. There's the bizarre Christmas day nearly a decade ago when Amber's sister-in-law suddenly disappeared from the country house they were sharing, taking her husband and children with her, and reappeared a day later, never referring to the incident again. Then there's the unexplained recent murder, in which those same words (Kind - Cruel...) were found to have been written in a notebook in the murdered woman's flat. Then there's the death by fire of Amber's best friend, whose two children now live with Amber and her husband Luke. And all of this is being investigated by DI Simon Waterhouse, unofficially helped by his wife Charlie, who is also undergoing hypnotherapy, ostensibly to help her to stop smoking but actually hoping for some help with the sexual problems of her marriage. 

Obviously I'm not going to tell you any more, but I can assure you that all of these things do prove in the end to be connected (well, not Simon's problems, but all the rest) in surprising and ingenious ways. But in fact the solution, though obviously necessary and perfectly satisfying, is nothing compared with the huge pleasures along the way. The characters are brilliantly conceived -- Amber, clever, spiky, difficult, but full of love for her adopted daughters -- her sister-in-law Jo, apparently a warm, caring woman but one who is apt to suddenly turn on her friends for no apparent reason -- Charlie and Simon, whose ongoing difficulties have featured in all the earlier novels -- and perhaps above all the two little girls, aged 6 and 8, who are superbly characterised and whose conversations with Amber are wonderfully true and touching. 

I listened to this as an audiobook, courtesy of Audible, and it gave me many many hours of intense pleasure. It's out in hardback and on Kindle but not in paperback for a while yet. If I were you I'd get hold of it in some form or other as soon as possible. Thanks, Sophie! Can't wait for the next one.

Short Crime Story Comp

I saw this announced on the lovely Elaine's Random Jottings and thought I'd spread the word.

Every other month one of Bloomsbury’s Crime authors will be laying down the creative gauntlet with an original short story thus setting the theme for that month.  Then it’s over to you, the British public, to do your worst.  Criminally speaking of course!

Every other month, we will chose ONE winner and their story will be featured on the Short Sentence website.  Once the competition has closed all the winning stories will be published as a Short Sentence eBook along with the Featured Authors’ stories.  This will be available for free from all online book retailers.  Each winner will also receive a Day Rover ticket to the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (2013) and a selection of Bloomsbury books.  Four Runners up will receive a selection of Bloomsbury books.

We will announce OVERALL WINNER during National Short Story Week in November 2012.  The overall winner will win a place at the Writers and Artists Yearbook conference for 2013 and a Weekend Rover Ticket for the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (2103). 

The competition launches with a short story from debut crime author Parker Bilal on the theme ofDECEP TION.  Rules and details of how to enter are on the website – www.shortsentence.co.uk 

Other authors taking part include Conor Fitzgerald, Anne Zouroudi, Tom Mogford and James Runcie"

Why not have a go? I wish I could but much as I long to be a creative writer I seem to do better with non-fiction.

The Betrayal of Trust

When Susan Hill's Simon Serailler novels started coming out I was absolutely glued to them. Then I read the penultimate one (can't remember the title now) and was somewhat underwhelmed. But when Audible offered me this, the latest, I was curious to see how I'd like it. And I loved it. Now, what's a bit strange, is that when I looked it up on Amazon just now I found a whole slew of negative reviews saying 'Dreadful', 'Totally Disappointing' and so on and so on. Of course there are good ones on there too but I was amazed really that anyone would dislike it so much. 'Too Many Loose Ends' was another comment -- well so what? In my opinion that is the skill of writing a series -- give the readers something to mull and wonder over so that they want to buy the next book. 

Another complaint was that this was not a proper crime novel. Well, yes, it deals with a cold case rather than a recent one -- a girl who disappeared fourteen years earlier and whose body suddenly turns up after a landslide.  Simon sets out to solve it and he does. But there are many sub-plots and of course you do wonder how they are all related -- and of course in the end they are. But the issues raised along the way were really interesting. Euthanasia is an important theme, rearing its head because one character discovers that she has motor neurone disease and wants to end her life before it becomes unbearable. Although the general implication seems to be that this is not something Susan Hill is in favour of, the situation is dealt with enormously sympathetically so that whatever one's personal view may be, it is very easy to understand and sympathise with this woman's terrible fears and her subsequent decision. Also handled with great sensitivity is the horror of losing someone you love to Alzheimers. And that's not to mention the ongoing personal issues that face Simon's family -- his widowed sister, trying to cope with four children and keep her medical practice going -- her medical student daughter Molly, on the verge of taking her final exams and facing some difficult ethical problems along the way -- his stepmother, discovering uncomfortable facts about Simon's difficult father. And of course there's Simon himself, who faces a new and overwhelming situation in his own life, which is not resolved here but presumably will rear its head in the next novel and probably the next and the next... 

So my verdict on this one is that it's an excellent novel. If I ever doubted Susan Hill's ability to keep up the standard of the series, this has totally restored my faith, and I can't wait for the next installment. Oh yes, and if you've ever wondered how to pronounce Serrailler, the reader of my audio book, presumably approved by Susan Hill, pronounced it 'Serayler'. 

Cover Her Face

About a month ago I read PD James's most recent novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, and was a little bit lukewarm about it. And now here we have PD James's very first novel,  which I picked up recently in a charity shop. Amazingly enough it was published in 1962, which is exactly 50 years ago. Equally amazing is the fact that, having been born in 1920, Baroness James was 42 years old before her remarkably successful career got off the ground. Inspiring or what?

Actually I have to admit I was a little bit lukewarm about this one too. It's quite a conventional story in the sense that it takes place in a medieval manor house and has a limited selection of suspects, most of them family members. The house belongs to the well-to-do Maxie family, parents and two adult children, Stephen and Deborah. This being the 1960s, there are also servants -- an elderly housekeeper and a young woman, Sally Jupp, who is an umarried mother with a baby son. Sally has come to the house from the nearby 'Refuge for Girls', whence she has been sent when her pregnancy became known. She is an attractive though not very likeable young woman, and the whole household is shocked when she announces to the assembled company at a dinner party that she has been proposed to by Stephen Maxie. Shortly afterwards she is found strangled in her bed. Who did it? Everyone seems to have some kind of motive, but it is up to the detective, none other than Adam Dalgleish, to weave his way through the thickets of deception and reveal the truth. Of course there are plenty of red herrings, but no massive surprises here, and in fact the final denouement seemed a little weak to me. 

I've read quite a number of PD James's later novels and enjoyed them a good deal. This one seemed very much like an apprentice piece to me -- conventional in plot and also in structure, with Dalgleish calling the whole cast of characters together in the final chapter and going through them one at a time till he reached the real perpetrator -- all very Poirot-esque. I suppose you've got to begin somewhere and this is by no means a bad start, just not the most exciting one. At least it knocks 1962 off my Century of Books!

The Big Sleep

You couldn't get much more evocative than this cover, could you. The picture doesn't actually represent the edition I've been reading, which is a three-in-one volume from Everyman's Library, but I couldn't resist the wonderfully noir-ish photo here. For this is, of course, a wonderfully noir-ish novel by the master of the genre. 

Born in America, but educated in England at the prestigeous Dulwich College, Raymond Chandler published this, his first novel, in 1939, when he was over forty years old. He'd been writing  for years -- reviews, short stories, even poetry -- but it's in this novel that his wonderful prose style found an outlet that brought him success and a great deal of admiration from other writers in particular -- 'he writes like a slumming angel', said Ross D MacDonald, one of the many crime writers whose work shows the influence of Chandler. 

You may well have read this, or seen the 1946 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but in case you haven't -- Philip Marlowe, a private eye in 1930s Los Angeles, is invited to a large mansion where he meets General Sternwood, a dying millionaire. Sternwood is concerned about his younger daughter Carmen, who appears to have run up large gambling debts, and asks Marlowe to investigate. While there he also meets Vivien, Carmen's older sister, who thinks the General may want him to find her husband, Rusty Regan, who has recently disappeared. Marlowe is soon plunged into a seedy underworld of gangsters, purveyors of indecent books and photos, and photographers who drug underage girls before photgraphing them naked. Several deaths and much secrecy and double-crossing later, Marlowe gets to the heart of the matter and, at the end, does his best to make sure the person responsible is taken care of in the best possible way under the circumstances.

The plot is very complex and at times almost confusing, or at least demanding of attention to follow its twists and turns. But what makes this novel so hugely enjoyable is the marvellously vivid picture it gives of the depraved underworld of post-depression California, with its gambling dens, drug addicts, wealthy nymphomaniacs and crime rings. Marlowe himself, despite an addiciton to alcohol, is basically a good guy with a strong moral sense and an attractive ability to see his own failings. But above all what I enjoyed here was Chandler's wonderful prose.

This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings.  They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion.

This was my second read of The Big Sleep and I loved every minute. Next up is Farewell My Lovely, but I'm spreading these novels out with other things sandwiched in between. Highly recommended.

Death Comes to Pemberley

How I wish I could say I loved this novel. I love PD James and I have heard her talking wonderfully about Jane Austen so, though on the whole I have given up on Austen sequels, I thought it was bound to be great. Now I'm not saying it's a bad novel -- if you read it in the right spirit you will certainly enjoy it. And what's the right spirit? I think you have to see it as a jeu d'esprit -- a bit of fun, in other words. 

There were certainly things here that I really liked. James has caught quite brilliantly Austen's use of language and it's always enjoyable to read someone's idea of what happens after the end of Pride and Prejudice. I thought James had imagined well the afterlife of Wickham and Lydia -- I was glad to discover that he had fought bravely in Ireland though his decision to leave the army was obviously a mistake. However it was a great joy to discover that he'd worked for a short time for Sir Walter Elliot -- this reminded me of my absolute favourite Austen sequel, Old Friends and New Fancies (1913), in which all the characters from all the novels interact in a delightful and completely convincing way. And in fact towards the end of James's book Harriet Martin (nee Smith) and the Knightleys have a small but important part to play too. I also liked the way James sorted out a few things that might have puzzled readers of P&P -- how did Lady Catherine know that Darcy was thinking of proposing to Elizabeth, for instance? and how she allowed Darcy and Elizabeth finally to talk openly about the first botched proposal. 

As for the murder plot -- well, it's OK, but don't expect anything too complex or challenging. I can't really say much about it without giving things away, though I expect everyone knows that it is Wickham who is accused of it. But this gives James a chance to show him in more depth than we have seen him in  before, and despite his obvious failings I found myself feeling more sympathy towards him than I had ever done. 

So now I find I've almost talked myself into loving the novel after all. 

Careless in Red

This is not a good novel. I don't think you've  heard me say this very often before, as I usually keep quiet about books I don't like. But don't mind making an exception for an author who is phenomenally, and in my view, undeservedly successful. Dan Brown is another such, and I've sounded off about him before, but in the past I used to quite enjoy Elizabeth George's novels so when this one came my way I thought it might be entertaining. But it was really not.

Very briefly, here we have Inspector Thomas Lynley (aka the Earl of somewhere or other) walking the cliff paths of Cornwall trying to recover from the devastation of his wife's murder. He stumbles upon a dead body and gets caught up in the subsequent murder enquiry.

One thing above all else annoys many British readers of EG's novels -- her tin ear. These are novels set in England but written by an American, and boy does it show. Oh, she does try, but it is strange that her English editors don't pick up on the many places where she fails. In this novel, for example,  I was terribly irritated by her constant use of 'likely', as in 'he was likely down at the pub', which cropped up both in the narrative and in the mouths of characters such as the Eton and Oxford educated Lynley. But here, on top of her faux Englishness, she has superimposed a faux Cornishness. This results in every character having a bizarre name -- Selevan Penrule, Kerra, Benesek and Dellen Kerne, Daidre Trahair, Cadan Angharrack -- sorry, but  no. 

The thing is, I have forgiven EG before because despite all this I've found her plots absorbing. Here, though, I kept waiting for the novel to take off and it never did. There's a lot of pop psychology, sub-plot gets piled on sub-plot, and the characters are uniformly unattractive and often plain unconvincing.  So honestly I didn't care a jot for any of them, not even Lynley who I just wished would pull himself together. I was tempted to just give up but ended up skimming the last quarter of the book only to find out who did it, which  turned out to be a big anti-climax anyway.

Sorry, Elizabeth, but I don't think I'll bother in the future. And sorry anyone who loved it -- lucky we don't all like the same things.

 

The Invisible Ones

One of the earliest reviews I wrote on this blog was of Stef Penney's Costa winning novel The Tenderness of Wolves. Like pretty much everyone who read it I was bowled over by it, and when I read it a second time last year in order to write a short essay on it I liked it, if anything, even better. So naturally I was anxious to see how she could possibly follow it up. And I'm happy to say I was really fascinated and gripped by The Invisible Ones. No, it's not The Tenderness of Wolves, and why should it be? But, though that novel was set in nineteenth-century Canada and this one is set in 1980s Essex, both share a sense of the strangeness, and otherness, of lives and worlds very different from the ones most of us inhabit.

This is a novel of two narrators, The first is Ray Lovell, a private investigator. As the novel begins, Ray is approached by a man who wants him to find out what happened to his daughter Rose, who disappeared less than a year after her marriage seven years earlier. He has chosen Ray for this task because he knows, from his name, that Ray is a gypsy, as he is himself. Ray is in fact only half gypsy, his father having given up the travelling life, moved into a house, and married a gorgie, a non-gypsy. Good money is put on the table, and Ray plunges in. 

The second narrator is JJ Janko, a fourteen year old boy and a member of the old Romany family into which Rose married. JJ lives in a modern caravan with his single mother, surrounded by members of his extended family -- grandparents, great uncle, and cousins. One of his cousins is Ivo Janko, Rose's abandoned husband, who takes care of their six-year-old son Christo. This is no mean task as Christo suffers from what the Jankos call the family curse, a serious inherited blood condition which is apparently incurable, though Ivo seemingly made a full recovery after a journey to Lourdes.

The ins and outs of these two points of view, which soon start to overlap as Ray meets the Jankos and starts his investigations, are really fascinating. The Jankos have many secrets and Tena Janko, JJ's great uncle and the family patriarch, is a firm believer in 'the old black blood of the Romanies' and a holder of the old stories and the old traditions. Many mysteries need to be unravelled before Ray solves the case, and in the process uncovers information that threatens the whole Janko clan. There is an important denouement which casts a very different light on everything that has gone before, and unfortunately I guessed what it was well before it was revealed. You'd think this would have spoiled my enjoyment, but it didn't, or at least not to any appreciable degree.

So -- what I loved, apart from the twists and turns of the central mystery, was the portrait of a race about which I knew next to nothing. The desire of the old generation to hold on to the old ways, the distrust of those who choose to dilute the pure blood, the superstitions and the arcane knowledge of herbs and magic ceremonies, the strong sense of family ties -- but also the low status of women, and the toughness of the life, and the racial prejudice suffered by the tribes -- all  of this was more or less new to me and left me wanting to know more.

I read a review that suggested Ray might reappear in future novels, and I would welcome that -- he is an interesting and complex character who spends much of the book trying to come to terms with his imminent divorce. If he does, I hope JJ will also come along -- his narrative voice is terrific, and his intelligence and sensitivity combined with his typically fourteen-year-old thoughts and actions make him a character nobody will forget in a hurry.

Stef Penney is a fine writer, and I strongly recommend this novel -- and if you want to read an interesting take on gypsies, here's an article I found.