Exit Music – Ian Rankin

There is a week and a half to go before DI Rebus takes his pension and bows out of the Lothian and Borders Police. His session with DS Siobahn Clarke handing over unfinished business is interrupted by a call to Raeburn Wynd and a dead body.

It is an exiled dissident Russian poet in the city to launch a new collection. Is the murder political, or just another mugging gone too far? Once Rebus gets involved more possibilities emerge as he sees (or imagines) connections to the Edinburgh overworld and underworld he knows so well. There are Russian investors in town, high-rolling bankers looking for profit, and politicians in the Scottish Parliament happy to facilitate where it suits their cause. With money and sleaze around, who better to insinuate himself into the mix than big Ger Cafferty, Rebus’s criminal nemesis.

Rebus’s (soon to be Clarke’s?) team is augmented by an ambitious but green PC eager to get a taste of life in CID. Problem is that he is from a criminal family – Rebus put away his granddad, and his brother is a drug dealing acolyte of Cafferty. Watch your back, John.

Rebus and Clarke build theories on the inter-connections. Clarke investigates conventionally, while Rebus, as ever, just pokes important people with a stick until something incriminating pops out.

Ian Rankin is comfortable in this skin. The prose rolls off the page with characteristic mixture of fluency and grit peppered with trademark references to Edinburgh geography, history, and culture both high and low.

As a finale, it is a worthy exit; case closed though some personal issues remain unresolved at retirement. We know now that Rebus returns for more, but for me this seventeenth, the planned end, will suffice, and ticks one off the book-et list.

The Satsuma Complex – Bob Mortimer

 Gary, 30, a legal assistant, living in a one-bed London flat, is a bit of a loner, though by circumstances rather than by choice. For months, his neighbour was simply ‘dog woman’ – not that she resembles one, but because she has a pooch. But recently she has become Grace, the dog Lassoo, and Gary happily runs errands for her - getting pies, toileting Lassoo – and pops in for a chat.

His only other confidante is a squirrel on the estate with which he has imaginary conversations when he has something on his mind.

Gary’s mundane life changes one evening when a work contact, Brendon of ‘Cityside Investigations’ invites him out for a pint at his local. Before they can finish one drink, Brendon takes a phone call and says he has to rush off on business. Also in the bar, sat alone reading a book, is an attractive brunette. She and Gary exchange pleasantries at the bar, then he joins her at her table. They get on well, have a few more drinks, then after a trip to the bar Gary returns to find her gone, though her book remains. It is called, The Satsuma Complex.

The story spirals out with disappearances, reappearances, deaths, policemen, and gangsters. Gary and Grace stumble through clues and crises trying to make sense of events. Gary is a low key hero, torn between his attraction for the brunette and his natural desire not to get involved in anything unpleasant or dangerous.

It is an easy read. Bob Mortimer’s familiar voice comes through strongly in Gary, but also permeates the narrative and to some extent the other characters, who all seem to share his distinctive conversational style. But the plot works, the characters are engaging, and interest is maintained to the end.

Colditz – Ben Macintyre

Colditz Castle was used, as most people know, by Hitler’s Germany to house Allied prisoners of war in the Second World War. And not just any prisoners, those who were serial escapers or were considered to be prize specimens due to their social connections, were gathered here, all the bad eggs in one basket.

This account, published 2022, takes a holistic look at the place and all those in it – prisoners, guards, and even the residents of the adjacent town. It also takes the opportunity afforded by a distance of seventy years to take a refreshingly independent view free from the shadow cast by the conflict, and for that matter the 1970s television series.

Though other ranks and nationalities get a mention, inevitably it is the British officers who feature most. After all, these are the people who kept diaries, wrote letters home, and penned memoirs afterwards. Their escape attempts, opportunistic or meticulously planned, done from a sense of duty or from personal desperation, are faithfully related along with the German countermeasures led by the anglophile Reinhold Eggers who moved up the ranks to become head of security at the camp. That the camp was under the auspices of the German Army rather than the SS or Gestapo, made such a game of cat and mouse possible.

Macintyre’s style is very readable, and he skilfully uses the chronological structure to show the changing mood in the camp from the bad boy club and jolly japes in 1941 fuelled by red cross parcels, through growing futility and boredom, to the underfed tension and desperation in 1945 as the German army retreated in the face of the Allied advance. Both prisoners and guards feared for their fate as the crazed Nazis in control the uncontrollable made life and death decisions on a whim.

All in all a well-balanced account of one of the oddities of World War Two.

Lessons – Ian McEwan

The novel opens in 1986 with Roland Baines halfway through his life and coming to terms with his wife walking out on him and their baby son. His first task is to convince the police that he has not killed her, or maybe that is second after the demands of the seven month old infant.

From there the narrative spills out forwards and backwards, sporadically chronicling Roland’s life of paths chosen and opportunities missed. Prominence is given to pivot points that he realises shaped him and his place in the world: an unsettled childhood; a relationship with his school piano teacher; meeting, marrying, and losing Alissa; then his love and ongoing care for his son. Everything revolves around and comes back to those things.

Slow, languorous Ian McEwan prose makes the five hundred or so word-packed pages a pleasure to read, get immersed in, and ponder. There are instances of passion, tension, and humour set against the background of key world events of the period, from the aftermath of the Second World War, through the Cuban missile crisis and the fall of the Berlin wall, to Brexit and COVID.

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is an AF – an artificial friend, solar powered hence sensitive, almost obsessed, by the movement of the sun and the effects of its rays.

At first, she is in the store window from where she hones her understanding of humans by close observation of scenes in the street. At last, she is acquired for a young girl. Josie is thrilled with her AF and Klara is even happier to have been chosen. But Josie is a sickly child, seemingly adversely affected by being ‘lifted’ – gene edited to boost her intelligence and learning capacity.

Klara, who narrates, slowly gets to grips with her new household – Josie, the working mother, the absent father, the housekeeper … and the boy next door. He and Josie are firm friends, but he has not been lifted so his prospects are limited. Stuff happens; the strange near-future world makes for an intriguing backdrop, and Klara’s otherness gives a skewed perspective on events.

There are multiple threads weaved into the narrative: Klara’s conviction that the sun is all powerful and can cure Josie (mimicking religious faith?); the extent to which an artificial object like Klara can equal a human as a receptacle for care and love (like a superior pet); the risks and rewards of gene editing; and the life cycle of consumer goods, even ones as treasured as Klara (remember Woody’s fate in Toy Story).

So, Klara, composite friend, priest, pet, and appliance. Her story makes for a thought-provoking and enjoyable read.

Becoming – Michelle Obama

This autobiography of the former FLOTAS takes the reader from her humble beginnings on Chicago’s South Side to the opulence of Washington DC’s White House.

It is a strength of the book, and of the lady, that she lets neither of these extremes define her. She is her own woman. Supported by a close knit family unt, Michelle Robinson does well at school and defies the odds by landing a place at Harvard, then a job back in Chicago with a prestigious law firm. She is given the job of mentoring a new intern named Barack Obama, and the rest is history.

But it is her history here – how she became herself, how she overcame setbacks, coped with work and then an increasingly politically distracted husband, and two daughters, both in the run up to the presidential election and during the two terms in office.

It is told in a straightforward fashion, chronologically ordered, and not over-stuffed with name-dropping. She gives credit to her role models and takes deserved pride in becoming one herself.

It is interesting for its unique perspective and insight into American society and politics in the years spanning the millennium.

The Corpse Bridge – Stephen Booth

The Corpse Bridge provides a crossing over the River Dove for a couple of ‘coffin roads’, old footpaths that facilitated the final journeys of the dead of remote villages, in this part of rural Derbyshire, to the burial ground at the parish church. When a body is discovered at the bridge, DS Ben Cooper is sent to investigate.

The body has been in the water overnight, so forensics are scarce, but the appeal for witnesses generates a handful of responses from people who were in the vicinity, and from locals who knew the deceased woman. Items of evidence turn up that indicate strange things were afoot that night, which after all, was Halloween.

DI Cooper and his team, supplemented by a rival DS, Diane Fry, follow leads, grill people of interest, speculate on motives an, in the case of Cooper and Fry, annoy each other, before it all gets resolved. There is clearly history between Cooper and Fry, indeed it turns out this is the fourteenth book in the series, but it reads fine as a stand alone piece.

Booth works hard to give a sense of place, invoking all aspects of the Derbyshire Dales landscape, both natural and man-made. It adds interest to the tale but with much zipping about by Cooper, maybe a map would have helped. The wide cast of both suspects and police officers gives little scope to develop characters in depth, though maybe in the case of the police team this occurs slowly throughout the series.

As a crime novel it works well enough but, unless its geographical setting strikes a chord, there is nothing to make it stand out in an overcrowded genre.