Big Sky – Kate Atkinson

 Jackson Brodie has washed up on the North Yorkshire coast where his business, Brodie Investigations, is turning over a living pursuing the missing and the adulterous, around Scarborough, Whitby and Bridlington. His actress ex-wife, Julia, is filming locally, so Jackson has the occasional help or hindrance of teenage son, Nathan, and Labrador dog, Dido.

There is no attempt here to summarise the story; the plotting and delivery are excellent, but secondary to the characterisation. It is quite a cast, starting with three golfing buddies: Tommy Holroyd, alpha male, successful haulier, into his luxury lifestyle with trophy wife, Crystal (of whom more later); Andy Bragg, more beta, second fiddle to his wife in their hotel business, but with a lucrative side line in arranging travel and job placements for young foreign females who want to work in the ‘hospitality’ industry; and Vincent Ives, definitely gamma, recently separated from wife, Wendy, subsequently moved out of the marital bungalow into a seedy bedsit, and to cap it all, now made redundant.

Tommy’s wife, Crystal, has a past to put behind her and she will put up with Tommy for the comfort and security he provides. Her emotional capital is invested in baby daughter, Candice, and teenage stepson, Harry. Harry’s interests are not trucks and golf, but books and theatre. He works part time at the vampire attraction and volunteers backstage at the pier theatre, helping the resident acts – washed up comic, Barclay Jack and rising drag queen, Bunny Hopps. Add to this two young female detective constables, Ronnie and Reggie, on a low key trawl for information on a historic abuse case.

It is a heady mix and Kate Atkinson lights the blue touch paper and fireworks ensue. Plots develop, twist, interweave; murky pasts emerge and uncertain futures beckon.

And through it all, Jackson Brodie plods like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern through Hamlet, a bit part player, never quite up to speed, but in at the death. Despite working on the periphery of events, his pithy commentary on life, punctuated by imagined dialogue with Julia, is central and, more often than not, funny.

The Prisoner of Heaven – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 In this, the third volume of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, centre stage is taken by young Daniel Sempere, son of the proprietor of Sempere & Sons bookshop in Barcelona, and his older friend, Fermin Romero de Torres, who helps out there.

It is 1957, Christmas time, when business should be booming, but Daniel is on his own in the shop when a grim old man, cloaked and disfigured, enters. He makes an expensive purchase but instead of taking it away, he leaves it for Fermin Romero de Torres inscribed with a cryptic message.

The message is a link to the past, to 1939 and the aftermath of the civil war, when the young Fermin is detained in horrific conditions at the Montjuic fortress. Also imprisoned there is famous (or notorious) author Daniel Martin, the main character from the previous volume – The Angel’s Game - who is now somewhat crazed. Fermin befriends Martin and learns of the hold that the prison governor has over the writer, which concerns a threat to a his (Martin’s) young friend, Isabella Sempere, and her young son, Daniel.

The dark story of Fermin’s past imprisonment and attempted escape from Montjuic is alternated with the more light-hearted present. Even there, there are difficulties. Daniel is unsure of his wife’s fidelity and Fermin’s plan to marry his own sweetheart has obstacles connected to his past.

Fermin’s breezy tone permeates the narrative and makes for mainly easy reading, with the plot less labyrinthine than in previous volumes. The characters of Daniel, and particularly Fermin, shine through and while Fermin gets some closure, Daniel has unfinished business by the end.

Presumably, that is dealt with in the fourth and final volume of the series, thankfully, completed by Zafon in 2016, well before his death earlier this year.

Into the Water – Paula Hawkins

 Nel Abbott has been fascinated by the drowning pool at Beckford ever since she holidayed in the Northumberland village as a child. In medieval times women branded as witches met their death there, and in modern times women labelled as suicides joined them. One as recently as 2015, a schoolgirl named Katie Whittaker, Nel’s daughter’s best friend.

And now, later that year, Nel too has died in the water. The first question, as always, is did she jump or was she pushed. The second question, whatever the answer to the first, is why.

Nel’s estranged sister, Julia (or Jules as she now styles herself) is called to Beckford to identify the body and look after her niece, Lena, who has now lost her best friend and her mother to the water. As an outsider, Jules, has no idea of the secrets, lies, loyalties and enmities held close by the community. Even the DI on the case lives locally, his wife is Lena and Katie’s head teacher. Fortunately, his DS, Erin Morgan, is an outsider as well.

Told from multiple viewpoints, insiders and outsiders, first person and third person, the events of the fateful evening are unravelled. Links emerge to Katie’s death, and one even earlier. And Jules must face revelations about that childhood holiday in Beckford that sowed the seeds of her and Nel’s falling out.

There is a lot of plot involved and it hangs together well. The multiple perspectives serve to flesh out the characters and move the narrative along at a ferocious pace. It is tense with twists all the way to the end.

As a thriller it is up there with Hawkins’ previous hit, Girl on the Train, which is recommendation enough.

The Bickford Fuse – Andrey Kurkov

We are in the USSR, sometime around the end of the Second World War; or rather sometimes, as the timeline shifts with deliberate ambiguity.

A self-propelled barge carrying explosives runs aground in the Sea of Japan. When the captain fails to return from seeking help, the only other crew member, Vasily Kharitonov, decides he, too, must look for assistance. But what about the explosives? His solution is to unravel a fuse (a Bickford fuse) behind him so that if instructed he can destroy the stockpile rather than let it fall into enemy hands.

He walks westwards, for years, unravelling what is now clearly a metaphorical (or metaphysical) fuse behind him. He encounters a range of typical Soviet nonsense – a ‘mulag’ imprisoning dissident musicians, a runway where no planes ever land but around which factions fight, a town whose inhabitants nearly all work in a factory producing straightjackets, and so on.

In parallel, there are a couple more wandering souls. A searchlight truck with a driver, Gorych, and a passenger sets off into the night. The night and their journey are unending, with the truck rolling on long after the fuel runs out; things happen occasionally. Elsewhere the one-legged Captain Koretsky is on a mission that requires him to deliver radio speakers to remote communities. In one such, he recruits an assistant, and they head eastwards.

Over it all, a powerless black airship floats at the mercy of the wind. On board, the father of the nation looks down on Kharatonov, Gorych and Koretsky, unable to intervene.

It is surely all very symbolic and it may be cuttingly satirical if you are Russian; and in that language the prose may have been less clunky than the translation. Otherwise, it can be enjoyed as a kind of Russian magic realism where the impossibilities and strangeness are the acceptable price of immersion in atmospheric settings and unusual characters.