Harriet Devine's Blog

The Day She Disappeared by Christobel Kent

I discovered Christobel Kent about a year ago when I listened to an audiobook of her novel The Loving Husband. I loved it. So I was excited to get a review copy of this one, just published this month. Would it be as good?

The Day She Disappeared: the She in the title refers to Beth, warm-hearted, beautiful, promiscuous. She's been working in a pub in a small seaside town somewhere in England, but one day she just doesn't turn up for work. Nobody takes this too seriously - she's got a reputation as a free spirit, and everyone assumes she's just taken off somewhere with a bloke. Everyone, that is, apart from her friend and fellow barmaid Natalie, who is missing her terribly. Nat has actually had a couple of texts supposedly from Beth saying she was off to spend a bit of time with her mother, but she's got a bad feeling about it and it's made considerably worse when she calls Beth's mother to learn she hasn't spoken to her daughter for years. Nat is fragile, recovering from a regretted abortion and a break-up with needy, unstable Jim, and Beth was a source of tremendous support. But when she contacts the police, she can't get them to take an interest. They are, in any case, concentrating on the recent murder of a young man whose body turned up in the river. Even the fact that he knew Beth doesn't cut any ice with them.

We know, pretty much for certain, that something bad has happened to Beth. This is because from the very beginning we have access to the thought processes of a very unpleasant character who is clearly responsible. This, we deduce, is the man who has been spotted by 93-year-old Victor, who was sitting outside his caravan one day and saw a man coming up from the river with blood on his sleeve. Victor wants to tell the police, but he has some kind of mild stroke and ends up in hospital, his speech and memory temporarily disabled. 

So structurally the novel swings between three point of view - Natalie's, as we watch her in her solitary search for what has happened to her best friend - Victor's, as he struggles to regain his memory and communicate his disquiet - and the unnamed perpetrator, who is watching Natalie from a distance and has her lined up as his next victim. All three strands are incredibly tense and nail-biting, and the narrative is constructed in such a way that you literally cannot begin to guess which of the several men who Nat has contact with is the actual villain. I certainly had no idea and I'm sure you wouldn't either.

In addition to all this there's an almost equally tense sub-plot concerning Victor's beloved only daughter Sophie. She's moved to London and married a man with whom at first she was very much in love. But, as Victor has worked out for himself, Richard is an abuser who keeps Sophie on a tight rein and more or less prevents her from visiting her much loved father. He is violent towards her if she doesn't toe the line, and also seems to physically abuse their little son Rufus. She manages to get away when her father is hospitalised, but Richard is threatening to come down and remove the child. This is all really well done, and Victor a wonderfully drawn character - I can't recall another novel in which someone in their nineties has been shown to be so bright, alert and full of energy, though he's totally aware that some of his faculties are getting a bit eroded and that he doesn't have all that long to live. 

So - if you're in the market for an intelligent, lucid, thought-provoking psychological thriller, look no further. Is it as good as The Loving Husband? I can't answer that. But in any case I really enjoyed it.

 

 

 

Woman Reading

This is 'A good Book' by Camille Léopold Cabaillot Lassalle (1839-1888). Apparently he liked painting middle-class women (as opposed to aristocrats or peasants, I suppose).

Anything is Possible (Shiny Review)

It's not much more than a year ago that I was reviewing Elizabeth Strout's wonderful novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. And here we have a follow up which I loved just as much. I've just reviewed it for Shiny New Books, and here is the link - and here's a taster of what I said about it.

I’m conscious, writing this, that it’s hard to convey the extreme beauty of this extraordinary novel.  Yes there’s so much pain here, so many misunderstandings, so many bad memories. But through all this come reconciliation, forgiveness and love. Elizabeth Strout has a profound understanding of ordinary people, folk you would probably think had boring, uneventful lives, but who are revealed as having rich, complex depths and immense capacity for change and development.

Read the full review here, and then go and buy the book - you won't regret it!

The Battle of the Villa Florita by Rumer Godden

I've been reading from my own bookshelves in the past couple of weeks - books that may have been there for years, waiting for their moment. I don't know why I never got around to reading this one - I've read a handful of Rumer Godden's novels and loved them all. I'm really glad this one's moment finally came - it's a powerful, moving, thought-provoking novel, and when I finished it in the small hours last night it left me with a great many conflicting feelings.

One of the things Godden does supremely well is to get inside the heads and hearts of growing children. Here we have a brother and sister, Hugh, who is 14, and Caddie, 11. They've lived an unremarkable middle-class life in the English countryside, but as the novel begins their lives have been turned upside down. Their mother Fanny has moved out, and is now living in a villa on Lake Garda with Rob, her film-director lover. Family, friends and neighbours alike have been deeply shocked and surprised - to them all this seems completely uncharacteristic of quiet, hard-working Fanny. But in Italy, Fanny is happier than she's ever been in her life. Cherished and well-rested, deeply in love, she's trying not to think too much about the children she's left behind. But the children are certainly thinking about her. Their older sister Philippa has taken it all surprisingly in her stride, but Hugh and Caddie are devastated, and want nothing less than their mother back in the family home.

 So it is that they cook up a plan. Caddie has been told she can't keep her much loved pony Topaz, and so she decides to sell him, and, with the proceeds, the children plan an astonishingly ambitious journey to Italy. They can't afford to fly, so they spend more than 24 hours on trains, ferries and buses, finally arriving hungry and exhausted at the gates of beautiful Villa Florita. Although Fanny is pleased to see them, she's forced to agree with Rob that they must be sent back to London. But Hugh has got food poisoning, and by the time he recovers, the children's father has had a business emergency and asked that they should be allowed to stay for two weeks. The lovers have mixed feelings - the intense happiness of their solitary life is certainly challenged, but they determine to make the best of it. Rob has a daughter, 10 year old Pia, who he sends for, thinking she will be company for the other children. But Pia is a devout little Catholic with a designer wardrobe, and makes no secret of the fact that she despises Caddie. Hugh, however, who is in an absolute fury with everyone in the place and refuses to even communicate, takes rather a liking to the little girl. He will not, however, participate in Pia's plan, which is to refuse all food until the adults see that they cannot stay together. Caddie throws herself in wholeheartedly, and makes herself lightheaded and ill in the process. But nothing will sway her from her determination to get her mother to come home. It seems most unlikely that her wish will be granted - but a dramatic event towards the end of the novel changes everything...

There's everything to love about this novel. It's impossible not to be happy for Fanny in her new-found happiness - her marriage to the dull, frequently absent Darrell has never given any sort of fulfilment, and she feels literally reborn basking in the obviously genuine love of such an intelligent, sensitive man, who really understands and appreciates her. Sexually, too, she is fulfilled for the first time in her life. But of course the children see none of this. As far as they are concerned she belongs at home. The pair of them are so beautifully drawn. Moody, difficult, adolescent Hugh feels like an adult in many ways, and certainly acts like one when he plans their journey and takes care of his younger sister on the way, but in many ways he is still a confused child. He is terrified of his burgeoning sexual feelings, and deeply divided about Rob, who he can't help admiring and turning to for advice, while at the same time hating him for taking his mother away. As for Caddie, who is really the centre of the novel, she's really lost and unhappy, especially when Hugh, previously her only real support, turns away from her in his anger and confusion. She no longer trusts her mother, has mixed feelings about Rob, and is completely in thrall to the untrustworthy Pia. She's fascinated by the little girl's devout Catholicism, which only intensifies her determination to get her mother away from what she now sees as a life of mortal sin.

There's a real and fascinating complexity of issues raised in this novel, and perhaps your response might depend on your own moral or ethical standpoint. I couldn't help rooting for Fanny and Rob, so happy together and so well suited - I really wanted them to find a way of working things out. But at the same time it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the children, whose lives are going to be genuinely and irrevocably the worse if their mother stays away. There doesn't seem to be a perfect solution to this dilemma, and the one that ends the novel left me feeling sad and confused, so that I stayed awake too long thinking about it.

Any Rumer Godden fans out there? She is a wonderful novelist - if you haven't read her, it's time you did!

 

Woman who can't be bothered to read

This is 'An Idle Afternoon' (1884 )by Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1855-1919), an American artist who spent most of his life in Paris. This could be me, dozing on the sofa - something I seem to do every time I settle down to read.

Cat Painting

Here's a painting of a cat, for no particular reason except that I love it. My source tells me it is by Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (31 May 1821, Amsterdam – 28 February 1909, Ixelles), a Dutch-Belgian artist in the Romantic style who is best known for her animal paintings; especially cats.

Parting Shot by Linwood Barclay (Audible)

I'm having a lot of trouble at the moment finding things I want to read or listen to. Plenty of newly published, or about to be published books continue to appear in the mailbox, but the ones I've tried recently have been really disappointing, and nothing on the existing bookshelves has really grabbed me. So I was really pleased to see that Linwood Barclay has a new novel out, and I was able to order it with my last remaining Audible credit.

I've written about Linwood Barclay on here before, quite a few times. Although I'm not a great admirer of American crime bestsellers in general, I can make exceptions when I find a writer whose work seems intelligent, well-written and thought provoking. I'm less and less keen on violent crime, and I enjoy some human interest. I'm not sure how or when I discovered Barclay but he pretty much fits the bill, and I've read all his novels to date.

Barclay is actually Canadian, but his novels are based in the US, in an imaginary small  town in Northern New York State called Promise Falls. Over the years a rather worrying number of serious crimes have occurred here - the place is in danger of coming to resemble Midsomer in that respect. But of course, like many another long-running series, staying in the same place allows regular readers or viewers to get to know the inhabitants really well, and that's just how Barclay's books work if you've read more than one of them. Not that this means you have to know the whole series to enjoy a single novel - naturally any references to past events are explained sufficiently to make the books work as stand-alones. But prior knowledge obviously adds a level of quiet enjoyment.

In Parting Shot, the two series characters we meet are seasoned cop Barry Duckworth and private investigator Cal Weaver. The two are friends, but don't see a lot of each other, and thus it happens that the two apparently unrelated cases they are each working on turn out to be part of the same story. Barry has been called out to investigate a bizarre and apparently motiveless crime. A young man has been drugged and abducted outside a downtown bar, and when he reappears after two days, he has a crudely executed tattoo on his back accusing him of being responsible for the death of someone called Sean. He's an innocent, guileless sort of chap, and the police are baffled - the only Sean he ever knew was a dog which he accidentally knocked down when he was learning to drive several years ago, but since the dog's owner is a ninety-year-old disabled woman, it seems unlikely that she had anything to do with the tattooing. 

Cal, meanwhile, has been employed to look after an eighteen-year-old boy who is receiving death threats from an online vigilante group known as Just Deserts, whose sole purpose is to take revenge on people who they believe to have been unfairly acquitted of serious crimes. Their most recent target has been a young man who was accused of sexually molesting a mentally challenged girl but who managed to get a not-guilty verdict. Horrific pictures on the website show the appalling revenge that was taken - the man was stripped naked and attacked by a vicious dog with predictably awful results. Now they've turned their attention to Jeremy Plimpton, whose clever lawyer managed to get him exonerated even though he was responsible for the death of a young woman while driving under the influence. Jeremy is being deluged with online abuse and violent emails, and he is being tracked by people threatening to kill him. His ditsy, overprotective mother persuades Cal to take Jeremy away for a few days until things, hopefully, die down. But it's not so easy to escape people who have access to sophisticated tracking devices and are being encouraged to post updates on Jeremy's whereabouts.

It's not difficult to guess that these two cases are going to turn out to be related, but that's actually one of the strengths of the novel. Something that adds a good deal of tension is the fact that Barry and Cal are working away diligently but have not shared their information though naturally in the end they are brought together in an exciting standoff in Cape Cod. By this time the reader has been introduced to the main perpetrator, a very unsavoury and disturbed character, so, though there's a final twist - more than one, in fact - this is not exactly a whodunit. But a number of strands still need to be unravelled and I certainly didn't guess what was coming in the final pages. 

There are indeed some nasty and disturbed characters here, and most people in the novel are not free from flaws. But there's also a lot of heart in Barclay's novels. Family relationships are dealt with sensitively, with all their ups and downs - parents genuinely care for their children and vice versa, though at times communication is lacking. Barry and Cal are not without their faults but both are genuinely good men struggling to combat the evils that seem to be a recurring feature of life in their local community.

 I listened to this on Audible, excellently read by Jeff Harding, and can wholeheartedly recommend it if you want an enjoyable 13 hours of listening time. Or, of course, you could buy the book.

 

Woman Reading

This is 'An Evening at Home' by Edward John Poynter (1836-1919). I've been posting these paintings more or less weekly for years - I love seeking them out and enjoy it when friends send me suggestions. I rarely get any comments on them but I allow myself to believe that people like seeing them anyway. I also suspect that pretty Victorian ones with lovely dresses are the most popular, so here is one such.

Woman Reading

Here's a rather fascinating painting by the Japanese artist Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924). He was 'noted for bringing Western theories about art to a wide Japanese audience' according to Wikipedia - he was studying law, but was convinced by some friends saying that 'he could better help his country by learning to paint like a Westerner rather than learning law'. 

Murder on Brittany Shores by Jean-Luc Bannalec

Back in 2014 I reviewed Jean-Luc Bannalec's first novel, Death in Pont Aven, for Shiny New Books (here). I'd enjoyed it quite a lot, though as I said in the review my pleasure was augmented by the fact that I'd recently visited the beautiful area of Western Brittany where the novel was set, and which is not a million miles from where I live. I then proceeded to forget all about Bannalec and his detective Commissaire Dupin until a few weeks ago when I spotted this, his second novel, on Amazon. Set on the Îles de Glénan, an archipelago off the south Brittany coast, this sounded intriguing, and was crying out to be read. I've just finished it. 

Although I've visited that part of Brittany a number of times, I'd never heard of Glénan. The islands are about 20 kilometres from the mainland, and are often compared to the Caribbean - miles of unspoiled white sand beaches, extraordinarily clear seas constantly changing between varying shades of turquoise, virtually empty of inhabitants, though much visited by tourists in the summer months. The people who do live there, or at least pass much of their time there, are naturally enough connected in some way with the sea - there's a successful diving school, for one thing, and everyone, visitors and inhabitants alike, tends to congregate in an attractive café restaurant on one of the main islands. 

But Commissaire Dupin is not there for the wine and the lobster, though he manages to enjoy both of these during his necessarily frequent visits. Necessary because three people have been found dead in the nearby seas. Initially this was thought to be an unfortunate boating accident, but when it turns out that the men had been drugged before they set out to sea in bad weather, this turns into a murder investigation. We are now plunged into the Breton equivalent of a manor house mystery(i.e. with a small number of possible suspects) - the men had dinner and drinks in the restaurant before setting out, and it's clear that the drug must have been administered during their meal. Who could be responsible? The sister of one of the dead men stands to inherit huge sums of money and valuable property, but every one of the small group of permanent residents turns out to have had some kind of relationship with one or more of the dead men. There are various leads to pursue - it appears that treasure hunting is a massive, but secret, enterprise on the islands, as a great many important and wealthy ships lie still undiscovered under the waters, and this seems a likely motive for the murders.

Dupin is confused by too many leads and too many suspects. He's forced to make numerous journeys across from Concarneau, his home base on the mainland, some by helicopter and others in boats, a form of transport he hates. He's a grouchy and irritable sort of chap, and seems to rather despise the police officers who work with him. He's a total caffeine addict and can't function without several strong espressos downed at intervals throughout the day. He finally works out who he decides is responsible, but there's a bit of a twist at the end which takes him, and hopefully us, by surprise.

I quite enjoyed meeting Dupin again, but most of all I enjoyed exploring this beautiful location. The author is actually German - Bannalec is the pseudonym of a German publisher Jorg Bong. He's obviously madly in love with Brittany and wallows rather not just in natural descriptions but also in little tidbits of Breton lore. I thought he piled it on a bit thick at times, and found the plot to be sometimes rather too packed with incidents and a confusing number of suspects. But it passed some enjoyable hours, and I look forward to the third novel in the series, which I gather exists but which has not yet been translated into English.