The Muse – Jessie Burton

London 1967, Odelle Bastien, five years since arriving from Trinidad with her degree, leaves her job at Dolcis shoe shop to start work as a typist at the Skelton Institute of Art. It is a glorified gallery and art dealership owned by the urbane Edmund Reede and managed by the formidable Marjorie Quick.

Quick takes Odelle under her wing, and Odelle finds the older woman intriguing, bordering on mysterious. Her curiosity intensifies when a young man brings in a painting inherited from his recently deceased mother. It is a striking work depicting a glorious Andalusian landscape behind, in the foreground, a girl holding in her hand a severed head. When Quick sees the painting, she is visibly shaken.

Cut to 1936, Andalusia, in a Spain on the brink of civil war, where the Schloss family of three arrive at a rundown quinta. Harold is an exiled Austrian Jewish art dealer; his English wife, Sarah, has money and issues; their nineteen-year-old daughter Olive has a decision to make. She has an offer of a place at a prestigious art school in London but is entranced by the local landscape and light. The Schlosses are met by Isaac and Teresa Robles, young half siblings looking for casual employment. Teresa becomes housekeeper and Isaac, an aspiring artist, is commissioned by Harold to paint a portrait of his wife and daughter.

The novel toggles chunkily between the timelines, the connection between them slowly and sinuously emerges. Never obvious, never forced, just perfectly done. Each setting has a fine sense of time and place. Each character has depth and nuance. The writing is easy on the eye, yet full of both wit and grit. In each timeline pace is slowly built up to twin exciting climaxes and a resolution uncertain to the end.

It is simply an exceedingly good read.

In the Blink of an Eye – Jo Callaghan

DCS Kat Frank returns to the Warwickshire Police after a career break covering the terminal illness and death of her husband. She’s ready to return but has promised 18-year-old son Cam that she will take on an executive level post away from the front-line dangers of the job.

The Chief Constable has just the role for her - a pilot scheme to assess the efficacy of using AI to assist officers in the field, initially looking at some cold missing persons cases. More specifically she will have on the team a prototype artificially intelligent detecting entity - AIDE Lock. It resides in a bulky bracelet round her wrist but, unnervingly, can emerge like a genie from a bottle to take the form of a humanoid hologram and join in conversations and interrogations. Kat completes her team with a male DI – Rayan Hassan – and a female DS – Debbie Browne.

Which case to prioritise? The question immediately pitches AIDE Lock’s objective algorithmic analysis against the colleagues’ subjective, experience-based, gut-feeling approach. It is a tension that lasts throughout.

The priority cases (they compromise on two) are subjected to review. Re-examining evidence and re-interviewing witnesses open new lines of investigation. Supercharged by AIDE Lock’s prodigious analytic capacity, progress is made rapidly. So rapidly that the cold cases soon become red hot, and Kat’s promise to stay clear of personal risk soon goes by the board.

As ever, personal lives are dipped into, prejudices are aired, mistakes are made and learned from, making for as good a detective novel as any. It is well written, and the AI twist is modern and timely. But not totally innovative, echoing (probably unconsciously) Isaac Asimov’s 1950s detective novels partnering a human and robot – Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. Not bad company rub shoulders with.

Bridge of Clay – Markus Zusak

It is, essentially, the story of the Dunbar boys down under. And of their parents, and of their curiously named menagerie living in the Sidney suburbs.

Matthew narrates, in unconventional style, both staccato and fluent, poetic and prosaic, always readable, always enjoyable. He is the eldest, necessarily the responsible one. Then comes Rory (the fighter) and Henry (the grifter). Fourth is Clay(ton), the eponymous one, quiet, deep, gentle, uncommunicative, but universally liked. Little Tommy (bewildered spectator) completes the quintet.

The story evolves a-chronologically, with flashbacks providing their parents’ backstories - Penny Lesciuszko’s Polish roots and iron curtain escape; Michael Dunbar’s broken prior relationship – before settling down into two broad timelines. One leads up to Penny’s demise and Michael’s desertion leaving the teenage boys to fend for themselves. The other, later, covers Michael’s return to face the music, looking for what? Forgiveness? Understanding? Or just help to build a bridge at his place in the outback? Clay is the only one to respond. There’s a reason.

There is more, much more. There is Michael’s art, Penny’s music, Michelangelo’s architecture, running, fighting, horseracing and the stable girl turned jockey. And throughout, echoes of the Iliad - in the Homeric telling and in the names of Hector the cat, Agamemnon the goldfish, Telemachus the pigeon, and Achilles the mule. And Penny, of course, is Penelope. But, in the end, it all comes back to Clay.

It is good, very good, celebrating life’s rich tapestry but not avoiding the reality, the flipsides: no life without death, no love without loss. Its quirky style and jumbled timeline keep the reader on their toes but reward them with spikes of joy, nuggets of pathos, gems of one-liners, and, not to dodge the issue, the odd lump in the throat.

The Last Passenger – Will Dean

Caroline (Caz) Ripley embarks on a transatlantic crossing on the luxurious Atlantica liner accompanied by her relatively new boyfriend, Pete Davenport. After a first-evening meal and drinks they retire to their cabin and bed. In the morning when Caz wakes, slightly hungover, she is alone.

More alone than just missing Pete. The whole ship is deserted. Cabins empty, decks deserted, bridge unattended. No other passengers, no staff, no crew. But the ship is ploughing on regardless. It is a scary scenario; bizarre; inexplicable. Will Dean takes it forward in all its psychological unnerving detail, until …

Well, that would be telling, and we don’t do spoilers here. However, to give some reassurance, it’s not just about one woman and a ship. Other characters are involved, and there are back stories to be shared. Then there is a mind-blowing reveal that hikes the action and tension up a notch.

And that is what drives the story on, along with, for me, a reducing willingness to suspend disbelief in the premise and a growing curiosity as to whether a more sensible explanation might emerge.

What more to say? The main Caroline character is well drawn, the present tense narration (hers throughout) works well enough, and give Dean credit for extrapolating a contemporary trend to an ultimate if somewhat preposterous end point.

Maigret and the Apparition – Georges Simenon

An attempted murder in Paris is a crime close to home for Chief Superintendent Maigret as a fellow officer is gunned down in the street. The victim, Inspector Lognon, is not a member of his Crime Squad but is an old colleague and as he is rushed to hospital, Maigret gets on the case.

But what is the case? Lognon is in a coma, no-one at his station knows what he was working on or why he was in the street at night. When investigations on site reveal he was a regular late-night visitor to the nearby apartment of a young woman, who has since disappeared, some jump to the obvious conclusion. But Maigret thinks not and digs deeper, roots around the neighbours, builds a hypothesis that centres on a substantial property across the road where lives a Dutch art dealer and his attractive wife.

Police procedure proceeds impeccably, though Maigret, as ever, finds time to pop into bistros and cafes for necessary refreshments. Drawing on the work done by his inspectors in the field and intelligence gleaned from his contacts in Nice and London, Maigret probes, interrogates, and deduces.

It is classic Simenon and Maigret with the atmospheric Paris setting, quirky characters, economy of prose, and a complex puzzle to unravel. Done and dusted in under 160 pages. Old school!

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray

The Barnes family are, to all appearances, successful, one of the leading families in the Irish town where they reside. Dickie Barnes runs the local car dealership, taken over from his father. Imelda, his wife, was the town beauty when they married and still has the looks, the clothes, and the bearing to attract admiring glances. Daughter, Cassandra (Cass), is doing well at school, destined (with best friend Elaine) for Trinity College Dublin. Son, PJ, is younger and happy just to amass scientific facts and play his computer games.

But the Barnes business has entered the choppy waters of the crashing Irish economy and is about to hit the rocks. The narrative passes through the four points of view in satisfyingly meaty sections.

Cass gets wind that Dad’s business is ‘slowing down’ and that belts need tightening, not what she wants to hear ahead of university. It’s another insecurity piled on top of her own teenage angst. She turns to parties, drink, boys.

The crash affects PJ too as, targeted by school bullies, he needs cash to buy them off, but the bank of mum and dad is dry. Desperate measures need to be considered.

Imelda is reduced to selling off her extensive wardrobe and accumulated household luxuries to maintain her lifestyle and place in the local ladies’ society. Dickie is to blame of course, and marital relations are non-existent. An attractive woman, neglected, is prey to temptation.

Finally, Dickie, at a loss, waiting for an upturn, haunted by a past that is waiting to re-emerge, and fearful of a future where his own problems become conflated with potential societal breakdown. Building a bunker to hole up in seems a good option.

The four perspectives work well, and the narrative weaves the developing crises with the back story of Dickie and Imelda, which increasingly contextualises the present. A final section combines the four voices in a ratatat crescendo and a helter-skelter dash for the line as storylines merge in a thunderous (literally, it takes place in a thunderstorm) climax.

A good, compulsive, insightful read, but two reservations. Murray chooses to eschew some punctuation conventions, like speech marks (an increasingly common affectation) and, in one narrative, full stops! And he ends with a bit of a tease, a disappointment after the 650-page build-up.

Lion – Saroo Brierley

At five years old, Saroo lived in poverty somewhere in India with his mother, brothers, and sister. He had no education, barely any vocabulary, did not know his family name, and had only vague phonetic notion of where he lived. Not that unusual in his situation but when he gets onto a train that deposits him over 24 hours later in Calcutta (as it was then known) such ignorance is problematic.

He can’t get a train back (where to?) nor ask someone to contact his family (what name?) so he wanders the platforms of the vast Howrah station and surrounding streets, begging and scavenging, and narrowly avoiding the fates lying in wait for such as he.

Eventually he falls into the hands of the authorities and is soon classified as a lost child whose origins cannot be traced and is taken in by an agency that facilitates international adoption. Within weeks he is in Hobart, Tasmania with Mr & Mrs Brierley. Talk about culture shock! But Saroo thrives and soon takes to the Aussie lifestyle.

However, he never forgets home, his mother, his siblings. Periodically, at university with access to the internet, then as a young professional with a laptop and Google earth, he searches for places that might fit the few clues held in his childhood memory. It is a needle in a haystack task, but he is dogged and methodical and he finds it. (No spoiler – the prologue reveals this before flashing back.) He takes a trip back to see if any of his family remain.

What has it to do with a lion? It is explained in the book, and a 2016 tie-in film used that title. However, the original title of A Long Way Home fits better.

It is a good story, and a true one, a biography remarkable enough to make the simply told narrative an interesting read.