Book #55 Holy Island (DCI Ryan #1)

Holy Island: A DCI Ryan Mystery by L.J. Ross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had no idea that there is a thriving community living on the holy island of Lindisfarne. L.J. Ross certainly made me aware of this and an internet search revealed a mass of information on this island located off the coast of Northumberland. So, a murder mystery located on an island that is twice a day cut off from the mainland as the causeway between the two becomes flooded. This adds to an eerie atmosphere, the idea of being shut off and secluded for hours every day.

Straight off we are launched into a murder scene, no time for preamble, Lucy Mathieson is murdered and her body is soon discovered in the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory. And there is something diabolical lurking beneath the surface. DCI Ryan has been recuperating on Holy Island following an horrific case, about which we hear more of later in the book. He decides he is ready to take up active duty again to investigate Lucy's murder and his senior officer brings in Anna Taylor, an expert in the field of paganism, as this murder has ritualistic overtones. Anna grew up on Holy Island.

And more, much more happens in this page turner. How many suspects can their be amongst this small community? I found myself coming up with my own theories and I was certainly correct about one of them. The plot is perhaps somewhat preposterous; if you read it I think you will see what I mean. But overall I thoroughly enjoyed Holy Island and look forward to reading the next in the series.

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Book #54 Offshore

Offshore by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A collection of short stories, all set on islands off the coast of the UK. This set of mysteries features new cases for DI Jimmy Perez on Shetland and DI Willow Reeves on Uist in the Outer Hebrides. In 'Hector's Other Woman' set on Holy Island, we meet a young Vera, before she became DI Vera Stanhope, and the story of how she decided to enter the police force. One of the stories, 'Postcard from Skokholm', is written by Lynne Chitty, winner of Pan Macmillan's Bello imprint's short story competition. But overall this new collection of mysteries left me rather disappointed. Maybe they are too short, too few words to develop convincing plots and characters. Anyway, at just 73 pages it won't take you long to read and make up your own mind...

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Early Christmas Spirit

Well, there is only a month to go so I have started to stock up with a few choice single malts.

The Inchmurrin 12 YO is aged predominantly in bourbon casks and is light, grassy, and floral. It was a big hit at The Whisky Exchange Whisky Show 2015. The enchanting isle of Inchmurrin is the largest of Loch Lomond's islands and was once home to a chapel built by Christian monks in the 7th century. Known as the 'grassy isle' this single malt scotch whisky is soft, rounded and wonderfully wooded. It is aged in three types of cask selected by hand - bourbon, refill and re-charred. These whiskies are then brought together delivering a perfectly balanced single malt.

Scapa Skiren is a 2015 release from the Orkney distillery. Aged in first-fill American oak casks, this is creamy and sweet with notes of tropical fruit and heather. Within reach of the Arctic Circle, Scapa is part of the Orkney Isles. The Scapa distillery is perched on the tranquil shores of Scapa Flow. Inspired by summer's bright, glittering skies, described in Old Norse as skiren, this expression is exclusively matured in first-fill American oak casks, which produces a smooth creamy sweetness with that hint of tropical fruit, citrus and coastal heather.

Whether or not these bottles remain unopened for a further 30 days is however another matter....

Book #53 Splinter The Silence

Splinter the Silence by Val McDermid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another stunning read from Val McDermid. She really is unrivalled when it comes to crime fiction. The two unforgettable characters of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan are reunited in this brilliant page turner. The relief of reconciliation instilled with the whiff of police corruption and an ending that demands another instalment in this series. The psychological profiler Tony Hill, immortalised on TV by Robson Greene, comes across a series of suicides among women tormented by vicious online predators. A level of immediacy that makes him wonder if there is more to these tragedies than meets the eye. His erstwhile colleague and former DCI Carol Jordan has her own demons to confront and needs redemption from the scourge of drink. The mood between these two former close colleagues is electrifying, is their close bond to be reignited, will former colleagues rally round, will Carol regain her self esteem? Will Tony and Carol set aside their fractured relationship, begin to build bridges and begin the hunt for the most dangerous and terrifying kind of killer?

Splinter The Silence is an adrenalin rush that I could not wait to finish but did not want to end. Grab a copy and be prepared to stay up late. Brilliant!

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Book #52 A Good Year For Blossom

A Good Year for Blossom: A Century of the "Guardian's" Women Country Diarists by Martin Wainwright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a rare treat for all lovers of the countryside - for me an evocation of many happy times spent in my birth county of Kent and my love of wildlife and flora in all their guises.

Country gentlemen, bird-watching vicars and farmers have traditionally been the chroniclers of the British countryside. This wonderful book introduces a very different point of view. We see the changing seasons - and the 20th century revolution in the long-settled ways of rural life - through the sharp eyes of ten exceptional women including a leading suffragette, a classical scholar, an artist with her own large farm and a climber's daughter who turned to writing when her children grew up and left home. The suffragette leader Helena Swanwick, Gwen McBryde, whose husband died tragically within the first year of their marriage - and ran the lovely old farm of Dippersmoor Manor, Janet Case who taught Greek to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Arnold Foster, the toast of pre-first world war Cambridge undergraduates and lover of Rupert Brooke are amongst ten female diarists who lovingly record their surroundings with entries published in The Guardian over a period spanning from 1916 through 2007.

I loved it.

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Book #51 Harbour Street

Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It appears that I am destined to read the Vera Stanhope series in reverse order. I started with #7 The Moth Catcher (see my earlier review) and have just completed #6 Harbour Street. I came to this series in the wake of reading all of Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series.

This is, like Shetland, a classy and classic whodunit series, centred around the middle-aged, overweight DI Vera Stanhope, made famous by Brenda Blethyn in ITV’s Vera.

Vera is married to the job and still clings to memories of her long deceased father Hector, still driving around in his battered Landrover, enjoys sharing a drink with her hippy neighbours and still mentors her protégé DS - Joe Ashworth. And it is with him that this terrific read starts as Joe and his daughter Jessie are returning home on the Newcastle Metro after a carol service and are swept along with the jostling crowd. But when bad weather halts the train and the other passengers fade into the swirling snow, Jessie notices that an old lady in the corner hasn’t moved. Seventy-year-old Margaret Krukowski is dead, fatally stabbed as she sat on the crowded train. Nobody saw the stabbing take place and her killing appears to be motiveless so why would anyone want to harm a reserved and elegant old lady?....

No more of the plot save to say that Vera is relieved to have an excuse to escape the holiday festivities, which will take the team to the Northumberland town of Mardle to begin their enquiries - in Harbour Street.

Cleeves is an excellent crime writer. Harbour Street is full of good, old-fashioned detective work and the result is a perfectly crafted murder mystery.

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Book #50 Slade House

Slade House by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dark and disturbing, unsettling - a haunted house to die for. Literally. Slade House got into my head. Riveting, pulsating - watch out for those “atemporals” who pursue eternal life through the theft of innocent souls, and the “horologists” who treat it as a curse. A classic English tale of a haunted house - quite unlike anything I have read before in this genre.

There are instances when one, not sufficiently knowledgeable about the paranormal, requires a dictionary to hand: “The Operandi works provided we recharge the Lacuna every nine years by luring a gullible Engifted into a suitable orison…” Yeah, of course!

Slade House has a real Gothic feel about it, a boundless madness, passages of grotesque horror with inevitable consequences and the message that the defeat of ageing and mortality leads not to heaven but to hell.

Would you want to live forever? Not like this! So - don’t venture behind that black iron door...

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The Moth Catcher

The Moth Catcher by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I consider myself an enthusiastic fan of Ann Cleeves and have read all books in her Shetland series, all excellent books. The Moth Catcher is number 7 in the DI Vera Stanhope series; perhaps an odd place to start as I have read none of the others but enjoyed the series on television and am therefore familiar with her team of DS Joe Ashworth and DC Holly Lawson (for some reason ITV promoted Vera to a DCI).

As I should have expected, The Moth Catcher is a fine read. Vera and her team have to be on top form to figure out what is behind the murders of two apparently unconnected men in a secluded Northumbrian valley. This is a slow burner with meticulous attention to plot detail and characterisation. The details of the victims, the lives they led and their character are painstakingly built up by information gathering and questioning by Vera and her team. It is brilliantly done. The only link appears to be a shared interest in entomology and, in particular, the study of moths. The investigation really holds your imagination as the team close in and yet, for all the information it is not clear who is in the frame. Well, it certainly wasn’t to me!

Vera is a real character, a single-minded DI, who finds herself only really alive and motivated by a murder case. Vera is rather large, she is unfit, and she is middle aged and ought to be spending time behind a desk and thinking of retirement. But, instead she prefers to get results by being out in the field and still gets a buzz from the detail of investigation. Joe the DS, is a family man with young children trying to juggle family with the commitment required of him by his boss and Holly the DC, is a bright young woman wondering if the police force is really what she wants from life.

The Moth Catcher is a masterclass in how to write a police procedural and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have picked this book up in bookshops more times than I can remember over the last 40 years or so. It was the publication of the much vaunted sequel, Go Set A Watchman, that persuaded me to buy a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I vaguely remember seeing the film (movie) many years ago, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a small town in Alabama, but remembered little of the plot. So, I was coming to the book some 55 years after its publication.

I won't forget this book in a hurry. Its theme of racial bigotry in the 1930s is handled with a level of unexpected humour as told mainly through the eyes of Finch's young daughter. Humour mixed with tragedy and a faint note of hope for human nature. It is a touching novel full of the raw innocence of youth and the quiet humility of a good and gentle man. It has stood the test of time and I enjoyed it.

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